A drawing room in the west wing at Steel City House
Concluding my review last year of a movie based on a Martin Amis novel about the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family in a “Zone of Interest” next to the camp, I wrote:
This is a film about evil so banal it’s in all of us. So what will we tell tomorrow’s children, should humanity survive long enough for them to ask, what we did when holocaust came to Gaza?
London, May 17, 2025
To those who deny the horrors in Gaza, spreading across a West Bank illegally settled by die-hards of Itamar Ben-Gvr and Daniella Weiss stripe, and fully capable of triggering world war three, I ask on what authority they base a denial which pits them against the ICC, ICJ and every charity, NGO and human rights group (including Israel’s own B’Tselem) with a stake there? Against too that heartrending footage which, notwithstanding Israel’s systematic liquidation of journalists – even as medics carrying their own coffins fill the gap – pours out of Gaza in the world’s first livestreamed genocide?
To those throwing hands in the air in that self-serving infantilism which made bothsidesism a thing, I ask that they replace Palestinian with Jew, Israeli with German, Gaza “conflict” with Nazi holocaust, then tell me it’s just too complicated. Better still, stop whining and get up to speed. You have access to all the facts you need, on sites like this and a thousand others. Use them or, as Caitlin Johnstone recently admonished, be prepared to spend the rest of your life explaining why you didn’t.
To those horrified by the crime of an already blood-soaked century, but saying they don’t see what they can do, I say that while few of us can do much, all of us can do something. One of many readers of my site to have become a friend – god knows, I lose plenty the same way – and living in a town across the Clyde from Greenock, said this below my previous post:
I’m off to the Co-op where, instead of on the High St, we are having our regular Saturday vigil expressing solidarity with the Palestinians to support the vote Co-op members made to stop Israeli imports.
My reply? Chapeaux!
Go on a demo. Wear a keffiyeh. Raise the subject at work, in the pub, on the street. Display a poster in your window. Did you like my opening image? I didn’t get the dog on Amazon but, a snip at £7.55, did get the flag there – and unless you eschew Facebook, Apple and Windows, and are reading this on a Linux machine made of recycled bottle tops, spare me the lecture on bedding down with the devil.
Just for fuck’s sake do something. Now would be good.
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