Yesterday, alongside hundreds of other protesters (and exactly two protesting ducks), we successfully shut down the largest street in Chicago, Lake Shore Drive, calling for an immediate ceasefire. This is the only logical next step for collective action: less civil and more disobedient. It’s the only viable path to changing the minds of elected officials. When the people in power refuse to listen to their constituents or heed the endless calls to their offices or express anything but unwavering support for ethnic cleansing, people are left with no choice but to disrupt.
Over the last 43 days, Israel has killed more Palestinian children than the total number of Israelis killed by Palestinians since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Think about that for a moment and consider that the average age of all Palestinians murdered in the past month is 5 years old. With this in mind, you might be wondering how anyone could still support the genocide and reject calls for a ceasefire.
Personally, I’m of the belief that nobody starts out as the sort of person who would support a genocidal bombing campaign that murders children by the thousands. This kind of perverse thinking is something you come into gradually over the years, one moral compromise at a time. In modern times, information is unavoidable, for better or worse. You can look away, you can try to insulate yourself from it in some ideological echo chamber, but it will inevitably find its way into your field of perception every once in a while. And every time you’re confronted with injustice, you have to make a choice on whether to erode your personal sense of morality a little bit further than it was already compromised, or abandon your support for an apartheid regime. If you haven’t spent decades destroying your sense of morality, the choice is simple.
I believe this is part of the reason why there’s such a massive generational gap on the Israel-Palestine issue; most young people simply haven’t spent a long time eroding their moral compass, and nobody under the age of 50 consumes enough “mainstream media” to be convinced that abandoning their humanity would be worthwhile. They haven’t yet been sufficiently indoctrinated into complete depraved apathy toward the suffering of others.
Yesterday, the World Health Organization undertook a humanitarian mission to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza and found what they described as a "death zone". Their coverage of the scene mentions a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital, corridors full of medical and solid waste, increasing the risk of infection, and patients who died due to medical services being shut down.
“There are 25 health workers and 291 patients remaining in Al-Shifa, with several patient deaths having occurred over the previous 2 to 3 days due to the shutting down of medical services. Patients include 32 babies in extremely critical condition, two people in intensive care without ventilation, and 22 dialysis patients whose access to life-saving treatment has been severely compromised. The vast majority of patients are victims of war trauma, including many with complex fractures and amputations, head injuries, burns, chest and abdominal trauma, and 29 patients with serious spinal injuries who are unable to move without medical assistance. Many trauma patients have severely infected wounds due to lack of infection control measures in the hospital and unavailability of antibiotics.”
- WHO report on Al-Shifa Hospital
One of Israel's leading newspapers, Haaretz, reported yesterday that an official Israeli investigation concluded that an Israeli military helicopter fired indiscriminately and killed Israelis at the Nova music festival on October 7th. You’l recall of course that the apartheid state started its military offensive on Gaza (killing over 12,000 Palestinian civilians so far), under the guise of fighting Hamas and claiming that Hamas fighters attacked the festival attendees.
According to the report, the investigation also revealed that some of the attendees of the music festival were shot by Israeli attack helicopters, which were deployed to the scene after Hamas fighters reached the area. The indiscriminate shooting of these helicopters undoubtedly led to the death of Israeli civilians, and the story will continue to develop in the coming weeks, but the initial Israeli narrative continues to disintegrate like a sand castle at high tide.
A friend from college helped publish this video for the New York Times today, documenting a Palestinian filmmaker living in America and his struggle to maintain contact with his family in Gaza. This heartbreaking story is no anomaly, anyone with family or loved ones in Palestine has been experiencing the same pain for the past 43 days. Don’t stop standing up and speaking out for justice in Palestine. If your elected representatives aren’t picking up the phone and refuse to listen, consider creating a disruption that won’t allow them to ignore this genocide any longer.
Side Items
Huckabee Pardon: Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders had the opportunity to grant clemency to a man who has spent 32 years in prison for a murder that another man has confessed to doing. Huckabee Sanders instead denied him clemency, with no explanation. She did, however, find time to pardon a turkey yesterday. I’ll truly never understand the priorities in this country