“We are alone. Nobody cares”

Nuseirat refugee camp after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on March 18, 2025. (Photo by Moiz Salhi)

Philistines call it “mansplaining” but for those who seek to make sense of a world whose most perilous aspect is a dying empire fighting to shore up its global power, a degree of cerebrality is vital. Without it we won’t cut through all the surface turbulence – Trump does not  seek peace in Ukraine – to grasp truths more durable. And without it – since the scientific approach has the dual mission of looking beyond the appearance of things for underlying truths and accounting for their (frequently misleading) surface forms – we will fail to see that the distracting show of rupture, shift and hiatus attendant on the chimera of democracy clouds a more stable reality of imperial continuity.

Steered by tiny but powerful elites.

Without a modicum of cerebrality, furthermore, our emotions will be played in ways which serve those tiny but powerful elites. As they were over Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine …

… and every part of the planet where empire meets resistance – or simply an obstacle, such as a displaced people asking no more than to work the land of their forebears – to venal designs obscured by lofty narratives sold to the most propagandised people on earth.

Us. ¹

Yet that cerebrality comes with known hazards. Yes, we must step back for the bigger picture but if we step back too far or for too long we risk losing our humanity.

Three posts I read this morning deal with the atrocities rained down by Israel – and by Western elites who for reasons given here and here are not one whit less culpable ² – on the Palestinian people: men, women and children just like you and me but for the fact we will eat today, enjoy modern sanitation, and can expect to make it through to nightfall and our safe warm beds.

London, November 11, 2023

The posts by Caitlin Johnstone and Jonathan Cook are short and to the point. While each has its own focus, both stress the Biden-Trump handover as one aspect of the continuity I speak of.

The third, from Drop Site News, is more personal. As Benjamin Netanyahu took to the airwaves last night to assure the world …

 Gazan children Hamas has already felt the strength of our arm in the past 24 hours. And I want to promise you – and Gazan children Hamas – this is only the beginning …

… DSN ran with this:

“I couldn’t tell whether we were alive or dead and buried under the rubble”

A Palestinian journalist and mother recounts a night of terror as Israel kills more than 400 in Gaza

GAZA CITY—I woke up at 3 a.m. on March 18th to the sound of a massive explosion above my head, shattering the silence of the night. For a moment, I felt like I had died.

I lifted my head from the pillow, still unaware of what was happening around me. The air was filled with grey dust.

Suddenly, the screams of my five children pierced my ears. I couldn’t tell whether we were alive or dead and buried under the rubble. I rushed to hold them.

More explosions followed—Israeli airstrikes pounded Gaza relentlessly and without warning last night.

“Mama! Are we going to die?” my terrified 12-year-old daughter, Saida, asked me, her body trembling with fear.

I couldn’t answer. I was in shock. I looked for my husband, who had been sleeping beside me, but I couldn’t find him. Moments later, he emerged from the dust, holding pieces of cloth soaked in water. He told me and the children to cover our mouths and noses to protect ourselves from the suffocating dust.

I noticed the walls of the adjacent room had completely collapsed. That was the room we usually slept in, but by chance, my husband and I decided to sleep with our five children in a warmer room last night. I had no idea this trivial decision would save our lives.

I quickly threw on my abaya, grabbed my three-year-old daughter, Masak, in my arms, and my husband carried our five-year-old daughter, Hour. Our three other children—12-year-old Saida, 10-year-old Zein, and 8-year-old Sham—were close behind us as we ran out of the house, not knowing if we were escaping death or racing toward it.

Outside, we saw our neighbors’ house—the Jamasi family—reduced to a pile of rubble. It had taken a direct hit.

We stood in shock watching paramedics and civil defense teams pulling them out of the ruins. They retrieved 11 people from the house. Five of them were dead, including an eight-year-old girl named Siwar. She had been playing outside her house the day before. Now she was gone.

Eight-year-old Siwar was one of several members of the Jamasi family killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Gaza City on March 18, 2025. Photo courtesy of Jamasi family.

We fled the area, seeking shelter with relatives in a nearby neighborhood. We grabbed what little we could carry, but we left behind all sense of safety.

As we fled, my husband said, “When I heard our children screaming, I felt helpless. I only thought about getting them out alive, but I brought them out to what? To a life where we run from one death to another?”

We’re now cramped together in an overcrowded room. Even though we’re in a different neighborhood, fear follows us everywhere.

No one in Gaza feels safe. Israeli warplanes circle the skies nonstop, bombing civilian homes mercilessly, killing dozens without reason.

The airstrikes last night killed more than 400 Palestinians, including 174 children, 89 women, and 32 elderly people.

We’re still in shock. My eight-year-old daughter can no longer sleep.

I tried to comfort her, to help her sleep, but she kept waking up crying. She told me, “Mama, every time I close my eyes, I feel like another bomb is falling on us.”

I lay beside her to soothe her. This morning, I discovered she had wet herself in fear.

My 12-year-old, Saida, keeps asking me, “Mama, will the planes come back again?” I have no answer for her.

How can I reassure her when I no longer believe I will wake up tomorrow?

I looked into my husband’s weary, burdened eyes and asked him, “When will this nightmare end?” He replied, “We are alone in this world. No one cares.”

We’re trying to hold on to life, but life in Gaza is no longer what we once knew.

We survived this airstrike—but did we really survive this war?

* * *

1. Brainwashed? Us? But we have independent media, not like those poor sods in China and Russia!!  To which Caitlin Johnstone replies:

   Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture.

   The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings.

   You don’t have to choose between being happy and being informed

   An underappreciated aspect of capitalism is the intellectual and moral corrosion effected by the normalisation of mendacity; nowhere more so than in the commercial propaganda – advertising – our media saturated world is steeped in 24/7.

   How else could the appearance of rule by consent (meaningless when uninformed) be squared with the reality of a class rule denied only by liars and the pitifully credulous?

2. Our rulers are party to mass murder not just in the supply of its military wherewithal, but in shredding the West’s much vaunted civil liberties (dedicated post needed) in a climate of such moral insanity that those who speak out against that mass murder can be vilified, fired or even criminalised.