Listen to what it means to a child in Gaza to have even a brief break from the endless carnage.
Despite today marking the start of the tentative pause in open war crimes in Gaza, the apartheid state of Israel declared northern Gaza out of bounds as some of the tens of thousand of displaced Palestinians attempted to use the pause in fighting to return to their homes. As this four-day truce brokered by foreign powers goes into effect, prepare yourself and understand that this “pause” will almost certainly be interrupted dozens of times by individual instances of violence from the Israeli military. The exact boundaries and rules are yet to be formalized, and any resulting confusion will likely be lethal for Palestinians.
As the Gazan death toll climbs over 15,000 people and more than 6,000 kids have lost their lives, this brief pause in the bloodshed might allow some people here in the west to catch their breath, or for some Palestinians to try and bury a few of the bodies around them, but it’s not enough time to begin rebuilding or even cleaning up the rubble remaining of what was once your everyday life. Apparently it’s not even enough to return home if you lived in certain parts of Gaza.
The focus here in the west, as always, is on distraction and consumption. Black Friday and the persuasive voice of consumerism will never stop whispering. Yesterday, Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade, one of the peak public displays of capitalistic fetishism in the west, was disrupted by Palestinian protesters multiple times, with iconic images like this one burning into the collective consciousness.
The images from the protest actions are interesting by providing so much commentary so much as a sound or movement. They say so much about America’s ever present requirement to operate in and sustain two (or more) concurrent but entirely incongruous realities. So many people want to just forget what’s happening and enjoy their football game or gorge themselves on three plates of delicious food (looks guiltily in the mirror). But don’t stop speaking up and making clear that no temporary solution is acceptable and there is no quick fix to a genocide other than immediately stopping it.
Side Items
Dutch Donald Trump: This week’s election in the Netherlands resulted in a major and (somehow not really) surprising victory for far-right candidates like Geert Wilders and his ilk. Wilders has publicly expressed a number of sketchy views in the past - including directly linking Muslim immigration with terrorism and calling for a total ban on mosques and the Quran, and he’s been under police protection since 2004. Wilders became the leader of the Netherlands' largest parliamentary party as a result of the elections, but he doesn’t yet have enough seats to form a government alone, so the coming weeks will involve bargaining and compromising on who will get excluded most by the incoming administration, my money as always is on immigrants and poor people