Friday, December 29: In A Liminal Space
These days between Christmas and New Years are truly the waiting room of time
While we celebrate the holidays and prepare for the new year, Palestine gets no respite from the violence of the occupation. The Health Ministry of Gaza reports that 21,507 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since October 7, while 55,915 have been injured. In the past 24 hours alone, 187 Palestinians have been killed by the apartheid state. Don’t allow these numbers to become static in your mind, every death is a tragedy and every passing day is a mountain of tragedies.
The director of Gaza’s media office reported that there are estimated to be more than 7,000 people still trapped under rubble and ~800,000 residents of Gaza do not have access to hospitals. The problem is, no matter the eventual bodycount of this genocide, there are still people searching for justification for this brutal and inhumane violence. They refuse to understand that every dead child is a loss for all of us. For those keeping count, that’s more than 10,000 losses for all of us. For some it’s easy to minimize this genocide and look at the death toll unaffected, but what’s happened over the past ~83 days will take generations to recover.
By this point we’ve witnessed the confusion of the early stages of genocide, when the shock was still fresh and now we’ve progressed to the point of normalizing the unthinkable. According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, at least 308 people sheltering in UNRWA facilities including schools have been killed since October 7, a crime that should shock the world. But these hundreds of people are simply thrown in with the thousands of other innocent Palestinians deemed unworthy of western outrage.
There’s this persistent and lingering liberal idea that protests against genocide are meant to convince and persuade people to join an already-just cause. That is at best an empathic fallacy, this false projection that empathy somehow creates the necessary change. But empathy will never go further than either comforting or giving up power, these empaths engage on their own terms, only when and if they want to. Protests like those blocking airports or highways disrupt and attract the ire of those too cowardly to take a principled stance. These are the protests that force you to engage by stopping the flow of capital and exercising real power. If you’re looking at a protest calling for an end to ethnic cleansing and your only takeaway is, “Actually, you guys aren’t helping your cause…” guess what buddy?? You already oppose the cause.
As Imam Tom Facchine aptly described it, you don’t criticize the table manners of a starving person. We are starving for an end to the ethnic cleansing, occupation, and displacement of people in Gaza. We are starving for justice. We are starving for Palestinian freedom. I don’t just want a ceasefire, I want Israel and every nation and individual supporting these war crimes to be held accountable. May we never know peace until we know justice.
Side Items
Confederate Apologist: Nimrata Randhawa Haley (aka Nikka Haley) was confronted with a question earlier this week that might stump an elementary schooler. Nimrata was at a campaign event and had an audience member ask for her thoughts on the cause of the Civil War. Faced with this absolute layup of a question, Haley declined to name slavery as the cause of the Civil War, opting instead to claim that it came down to “the role of government”. Which really begs the question, the role of government to do what exactly?? This lady is the former governor of South Carolina (obviously the inferior Carolina) and the former US ambassador to the United Nations, and she’s angling to present herself as the top republican alternative to the return of president Donald Trump. 2024 is gonna be a wild ride my friends, so strap in