So Israel held a bunch of Palestinians in concentration camps without charge just for being Palestinian, and then they not only starved and tortured them but actually made them wear a Star of David on their prison garments. But remember kids, it’s evil and wrong to compare Israel to Nazi Germany — no matter how cartoonishly blatant they make the similarities.
According to an Israeli media report, last May IDF troops strapped explosives to the neck of an 80 year-old Palestinian man in Gaza and used him as a human shield for hours. They then shot and killed him and his wife.
When the Gaza holocaust first started I used to read headlines like this and go “Holy shit that must be an exaggeration,” and then I’d read up on it and go “Fuck, nope, that’s exactly what happened.” Now I read them and sigh and just sort of wilt inside.
My favourite Melbourne blogger pens today under the header, “I write about Israel all the time because I have to, not because I want to”. I get it. Really I do. My output since October 2023 has been only slightly more diverse, for the most part divided between the genocide (and related phenomena like US power grabs in the Middle East) with a not entirely separate shit-show in Ukraine. But I see why she focuses almost exclusively on what Israel is up to. Not least because its blatancy – the rape in earlier centuries of Africa, Americas, Antipodes and Asia now electronically re-enacted in the comfort of our homes – points to a tectonic shift; the shedding of all semblance of decency to reveal truths about Western empire and its proxies; truths long obscured by the idealism of liberal historians who told of an onwards and upwards march of ideas – not blood-soaked deeds – informing the artistic, scientific, technological and above all humanitarian achievements of Western civilisation. While a brutal past could not be concealed entirely, it could at least be bracketed as the Bad Old Days Before We Knew Better.
Not any more it can’t.
See US Neocons & Israel’s far-Right
Equally significant – at least to one like me, similarly gripped by a sense of choicelessness at times oppressive and always expensive – is Caitlin’s statement of why she writes “all the time” about Israel. Because she can’t stop. What else would she do? Somehow I can’t get my head round the idea of her as a lifestyle columnist, film critic or agony aunt. All of which she could do standing on her head, but why would she?
Caitlin Johnstone, with whom I don’t always agree, is that rare thing, a person both blessed with and afflicted by a moral conscience in full working order. I don’t claim the same for myself, but do have a modicum of empathy.
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