Genocide - Blog 59- “Vinday Zak” -- and How Not to Avert your eyes from the Israeli
21.12.2024
Horror is not an easy emotion to sustain. Nor is shock. Nor terror. This is what we feel when we watch, live on our screens, a genocide: horror, shock, terror.
And we know, meanwhile, that the people of Palestine, in particular in Gaza, are forced to endure sustained horror, shock, terror, all day long, all night long, day after day, seemingly without end. Not on a screen. But in real life.
For them, there is never even a moment in between, when they have the time to sit back and take stock, reflect and gather themselves, and begin to recuperate from the trauma. The sound of the drone overhead prevents that. The child who wets her bed every night prevents that. The mourning not yet done piles up inside each chest.
Just avoiding averting my eyes is not easy. For you, too, Reader, it is not easy. Which is why I write this blog for you, and for myself. To help us refuse to avert our eyes. To keep us working at what it is we can do to put an end to this genocide, and all genocides, all wars, all wanton destruction.
As I accept the gift of a lovely big Jackfruit from an old lady neighbour from across the road and up one, and we share thoughts on living under bombing, that, too, helps me not turn away my eyes from the slaughter. It helps keep me human. My neighbour is an expert on all things botanical. Kisna who peeled and carved out the Jackfruit is an expert on classification of Jackfruit, being a Montayn Ory girl. They disagree. Kisna says it is that king of Jackfruit for curry, called “Zak Labu”. Our neighbour says, “No, it is a “Zak Zonn”. Maybe it’s a new hybrid, yellow and creamy? The curry Kisna cooked with one-quarter was fantastic, and the Vinday that Ram made with another quarter is, too. And the other two parts in the freezer wait for another day, a day on which we will again feel the warmth of a neighbour’s generosity. All this helps me not to avert my eyes from the genocide. Not to make my heart turn to stone. Just being close to my neighbours.
The neighbour at the back fence has made a lovely roof garden, and he gives us mangoes from the tree in our yard that bears fruit over his new roof garden. I call up to him to come down. I give him a big breadfruit from our tree.
We, in Ragoo Lane, would not have to worry about who will feed our dogs if we all three have to be away. Our dogs just go beg from neighbours, anyway. Even when we are here. A neighbour on one side is always sharing a little something. The woman up the road who feeds birds, also gives a couple of biscuits to all the nearby dogs including ours, when she feeds the two whose owner left town and left the dogs to us all. And another neighbour at the back gives our dogs the odd snack, too. And this neighbourly kindness helps me know that the Palestinian families, bereaved and in trauma, take in orphaned children, including those with a leg amputated, and even share their meager rations with a cat whose owners’ entire extended family was bombed to smithereens, right off the civil status records. Their humanity teaches us ours.
May our hearts never turn to stone.
That so many Israelis have grown in their chests a heart of stone is shocking.
That they can see their own leaders conducting, in their names, this slaughter, these massacres of babes in arms, of amputees, of young lovers, of old men who tell stories to children, and not somehow rise up in rebellion, is shocking. Yet. Yet. At the same time, as Kisna tells us when she gets back from Palestine, there are those Israelis that every day get up in the morning and head for the countryside in the occupied territories of the West Bank, and there, they stand alongside the Palestinian peasant families, who protect their sheep and their olive groves from the gun-toting, marauding Israeli settlers, encouraged by the mightily-armed Israeli army, hounding them off their land for 76 years.
And these Israelis, those who stand up and are counted, whose hearts have never turned to stone, give us courage, too. As do the two Israeli youngsters, who tell of how they physically attacked and broke into Elbit Systems, the Israeli armaments firm in Bristol. A short clip from them will help you nurture your own humanity, as it helped me nurture mine – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3Ga4DiV7eM
That so many Americans have a heart of stone is shocking, too.
That so many Americans can see their own leaders, in their names, financing, supporting, arming, egging on this genocide against the gentle ambulance-men in Khan Yunis, against the old ladies as they ladle thin bean soup into the bowls of beseeching children, against the two zoo-workers whose animals have long since been starved to death, and against those patient men and women, who plant strawberries and tomatoes and brinjals that then get basted into the dust before ever ripening, and not oppose these American leaders that pay for all this wanton killing, support it, organize it for all we know, is even worse.
Yet it is so.
And, as important, we see those thousands upon thousands of young students, and old Jewish ladies, and factory workers, who did protest and do protest in the USA and all over the world. And it is this that gives us courage and the warmth of spirit to go on fighting for an end to this occupation by the USA and Israel of Palestine, and now of parts of the Lebanon, and parts of Syria.
This accelerated genocide in Gaza has gone on for over 14 months now. Even for us, an ocean away from the bombs, it is well-nigh impossible to bear the shelling, the bullets, the being hounded out like animals being corralled from place to place, the fires spreading through the flimsy tents, the blockade preventing food getting in, the starvation, the thirst, the cold weather closing in, the constant sound of drones – does this drone above our house just spy? And who is this sniper trying to get in its cross-hairs? And does the other drone, the one that sounds like a quadcopter, carry a bomb that it is about to drop on my child, who has gone to queue for a bowl of food for us? And having had to watch the hospitals turned on purpose into rubble, the schools turned on purpose into morgues, the houses systematically torched. The doctors shot in the head by snipers. The children shot in the head by snipers. The people in wheelchairs shot in the head by snipers.
And now in the past week, everything is changed – for the worse – for Palestinians, in the short term.
So much worse will come. In the short term.
We must be ready for the long struggle. It has been over 76 years, and will not end soon.
Yet. Yet what is happening now will also, in the long run, be the beginning of the end of the state of Israel as a colonial, religious State. Yes, this rogue state, with its fascist Cabinet Ministers, will end up destroying itself. It has eaten its own future by committing this abject, deranged genocide.
And, if the USA doesn’t watch out, Israel will destroy it, too. As time passes, I realize, the tail not just wagging the dog, but stinging it with its toxin to death, a scorpion committing suicide. If empires were creatures, they would end up killing themselves.
So, yes, the USA empire, built by humans, an empire whose building blocks have begun to crumble, whose vehicles begin to trip-and stumble. The USA is an empire that has reached a stage when it begins its own fall, the toppling down that ultimately befalls all empires. Its fall comes often from the inside. It is often an implosion. It is a time of all dangers. Empires are at their worst as they fail.
The Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria, a repressive and bloody regime, but which nevertheless formed part of the military shield that Palestinians have relied, to some extent, upon, was finally brought down. It was brought down not by the rebellion of its people which began during the Arab Spring so much as by the USA and Israel and also Turkey, planning its downfall. The USA wanted “regime change”. So, first, it imposed 10 years of sanctions, political isolation, and actually funded and armed all manner of militias and Jihadis. The USA kept 1,000 troops in Syria. It dropped bombs on Syria. Then, last week, President Biden ultimately proclaimed that the USA had finally toppled Syria and placed it in the hands of none other than their own protected man, the once Al Qaeda leader and then ISIS leader, the hands-on beheader, Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, now leader of the rebranded Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, in a suit sewn to match, and reverting to his old name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
So, this man, who was on Biden’s own “wanted” list until yesterday, and on whom there was a USA official reward of $10 million for his arrest as a terrorist until yesterday, is now the de facto ruler of Syria. Beat that for being ridiculous, as only a falling empire can be.
Biden announces the enthronement of “his” man, proudly. And, since then, the USA and Israel have just continued bombing Syria, including with “earthquake bombs”. They have had nearly one thousand air strikes, ONE THOUSAND. Turkey can be expected simultaneously to “deal with” the Kurdish part of Syria. And on Telegram posts, beheadings are posted and bragged about by those claiming to have “won”.
So, like Iraq and Libya, like Afghanistan and the Lebanon, Syria is now on the verge of being reduced to utter ruination by the USA, aided and betted by, if not upon the instigation of, Israel.
But Syria, along with the Hezbullah in the Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen and the giant Iran, was part of a military “shield” for Palestine against the constant Israeli aggression. The new Syria is unlikely to be that. It is more likely destroyed. Israel has bombed all Syria’s defenses, and a good deal of its scientific research, too. So, now, the shield that Palestine benefitted from is finally being destroyed. So, for the Palestinians, before things get better, they will get worse. We were reminded recently of something sinister about this failing USA empire.
In 2007, former US General Wesley Clark, explained something important. It is in the news again. Here is why.
He said on Amy Goodman’s show in 2007 that about ten days after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, around 20 September 2001, that a top US General had informed him that “we are going to war with Iraq”. A few weeks later, he added, when we were already bombing Afghanistan, the same General told him he had just got another Memo from the then Secretary of Defense that “describes how we are going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran”. Well the time line was nearly 20 years longer than in the Memo, and the order not exact, but now, in December 2024, the only country left on the list, after the USA “took out” Syria, is Iran. All are left in different degrees of ruin after having “regime change” forced upon them by the US Empire, on a list that may have been drawn up by Israel, who knows.
So, we have the huge task before us, ordinary working people world-wide, of putting an end to this kind of non-diplomacy, this kind of mindless regime-change, war and pillage of a falling USA empire with Israel as its instigator and battering ram.
All this means, we need to keep up the struggle. For us, as well as solidarity, it means getting the US military base on our land, the Diego Garcia base, closed down. This will be in accordance with international law. This will, more importantly, help bring peace. We need to close down the “means” of war: bases and arms factories like Elbit. Worldwide. That can be our New Years’ Resolution.
And to keep close to our neighbours, our friends, and our comrades, in times we know will not be easy. Not in the short run. But, in the long run, of course, there is a world of possible peace and goodwill just waiting for us to build it. We have to start, at the same time, by seeing out the old forms of oppressions: colonization, imperialism, war.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
