The Genocide in Gaza Must Stop Now!

It is unconscionable for any person who cares about others' wellbeing not to spend every minute of their waking lives resisting the grotesque murder and starvation of the people of Gaza. Israel has proved itself one of the most brutal, dehumanising and violent states in modern history, ruled by genocidal tyrants. Of course there are many who live in Israel who do not support this psychotic act of state vengeance, and who would have sought a peaceful route through the horror. To constantly cite the violence of Hamas, its long-term militarism and cruelty, in order to excuse attacks on the Palestinian people, is part of an act of collective abuse that finds its roots in colonialism and underpins genocide. Hamas is not Palestine. What's more, the psychology of killing because others have killed (and killing in return on such a vast scale that extends back as well as forward on the timeline) is the destruction of humanity itself. Collective 'punishment' is overtly unjust by any measure, but to use vengeance as the basis for centralised actions is so far away from any sense of human rights as to be grotesque. The murder of people trying to reach food supplies, the inducing of mass famine to reduce a people to inability to act on any level, and then to see them perish, is genocide. It's such a severe situation that making analogies between the behaviour of the Israeli State/IDF and any other 'similar' crimes of history is pointless. This act of genocide will become in modern memory the basis for analogies of horror and wrongdoing for decades. And as for the vileness of the 'doing' or 'not doing' deals over what is so obscenely an unequal situation, it fits the endgame of capitalist over-reach in which capitalism becomes a question of whether an entire people mean value to the world marketplace rather than whether they are people. Everyone of us is obliged to act to save the people of Gaza — they are people, not representations on screens, not statistics, and not objects whose absence or presence is ultimately summed up in terms of the market place, in terms of what they are 'worth' to 'players' and vested interests. It must stop. Israel must withdraw. Israel must step back and let more humane agencies enter Gaza to bring some hope and physical and spiritual restoration to the people and land it has tried to destroy and steal. Israel must face up to what it is, end apartheid and share country with those whose country it is.

    John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan

The Mass-murder of Starving People in Gaza

Blue Light: Wealth and Power as Murder

 

To highlight an individual case

of starvation or to discuss the dozens,

 

hundreds, thousands killed trying

to reach food supplies in choke-

 

points overlooked by soldiers

who are impartial as nationalistic poets

 

is to metastasise metaphors

or fall into similes that never

 

wear down because of their brutal

effectiveness and disposability.

 

When we are dealing with the statistics

of war-induced famine — starvation

 

as a lure to wipe out an opposition —

we shift from one death to many

 

as readily as AI takes over morality.

And scrolling down to reports

 

of those who would vandalise trees

to defend their million-dollar views

 

having completely lost sight

of the avalanche of cause into effect

 

is ensuring that personal lines of supply

have been kept open even when

 

the ground has been flattened

and trees completely removed

 

from the blue-light picture.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Do Not Forget What is Going on in Gaza — It is Remorseless

Derelictions of Grammar and Rhetoric

 

‘...achieve all of the war goals in Gaza’

 

            latest official communiqué from the Israeli military government

 

 

Refrain of bombardment

and the oldest refrain of blockade

            and starvation insist anaphora

            is failing — from an outside

looking in, knowing a repetition

of death doesn’t add up to wisdom

            or even a beautiful if pitiless verse.

 

            The ‘goals of war’ are an intoning,

a grammar of removal. As cataphora

is to anaphora, why are they, the ‘citizen-soldiers’

            so ready to sing a song of killing,

            so ready to believe they will clear

a path through their consciences

with tanks and bulldozers?

 

 

            John Kinsella

Against the Ongoing Genocide in Gaza

Graphology Superscription 142: genocide phase 2 Gaza

 

The thin stretch of land Gazan Palestinians

have called home is more than a ‘sea view’.

 

But complicated by rubble and the odour of death,

the US will help decorate the guilty reminders.

 

And though it might be deft to say Trump’s

declarations are a real estate developer’s

 

sense of land-usage, of the profit

that will come from a glossy future,

 

it’s actually far more devious than going

eighteen holes (ready-formed by shell-

 

craters). In the sweeping aside of logger-

head turtles and jackals, in ensuring

 

contracts for Americans who make so many

of the weapons that have reshaped the past,

 

the endgame policies are energised

to drive the people out, to win history.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Against the Melbourne Arms Expo

It is encouraging to see many thousands actively resisting the arms expo in Melbourne. How things have changed. When a 'defence conference' was held in Perth some years ago only a handful of activists made any effort at all to speak out against it. The destruction of Gaza is the prompt, as it should be, but the war machine is grinding lives into slurry around the world in many different ways. There's the obvious hegemony-threatening horror of the war in (and out of) Ukraine, and the straightforward violation of human dignity and rights by Russian imperialism, but also the complication of that war by Western arms manufacturers clearly benefiting from the conflict (so little will to demand peace). 

The Ukraine-Russia war has become a bizarre 'settled thing' — a semi-accepted state of being in which subtleties of capitalism and despotism ride the waves of 'fortune'. For those injured and dying, it leaves nothing. 

The ongoing assault by the Israeli state against Palestine is not only an offence against humanity and the very essence of justice, it is one increasingly and passionately opposed by many Israelis themselves. The world's failure to stop these horrors is a shared one — too many benefit from arms sales and prosper under 'peace through power'. It's a case of 'working from home' or sub-contracting the responsibility for killing to others, and being able to go about one's daily 'business'.  

These conflicts must be stopped by a collective show of civil disobedience and non-compliance. We need a peaceful completionism that says we will stop these grotesque wrongs NOW and, further, we will keep resisting the industries and their war-thinking when these specific abuses are ended. I have frequently noticed that the passion for protest diminishes once something has been 'achieved', but it cannot stop for in reality it is rarely ever achieved. An end to these conflicts will not mean an end to the suffering, inequity and injustice. Only by stopping the manufacture and use of ALL weapons in all circumstances will those suffering be given hope, the dead respected, and the living given their best chance to continue living.

Here's a poem for all living things. It is a poem that intends to speak to humanity about its inhumanity.

Graphology Superscription 71

Dead Sea sparrow flees
across scripts, speech. 

Swifts call themselves
back to the Wailing Wall,

crossing such different
belief systems, psychologies.

Quail live in Israel
and Palestine, and feel

sacred in themselves.
A lesser whitethroat

flew from Lithuania
and was netted, ring

on its leg. It wasn’t shot
down, only captured.

Release is semi-conditional.
What goes on above

and below ground;
the weight of bones 
in flight.

John Kinsella

Letter to the Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 14/5/2024

 

To Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities

 

I wish to:

 

1. Support the absolute right for students to protest/camp etc. peacefully on university campuses.

2. Denounce the genocide being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza. Further, to note the ongoing systemic oppression and neo-colonialism enacted by Israel’s government, military and settler-culture.

3. I wish to affirm universal human rights.

4. Speaking from a pacifist position that rejects all forms of violence, I wish to restate my many decades-long objection to weapons production (for anyone anywhere), the military in all its forms, and places of learning being used directly or indirectly for these purposes. It is abhorrent that universities have so deeply connected themselves with ‘defence’ — an industry of death.

5. Speak against any form of support for such violence.

6. Speak in support of diverse communities across the globe that respect each other, share space and materials, and are mutually supporting.

 

Thanks.

 

Sincerely,

 

Emeritus Professor John Kinsella, poet, environmentalist, peace activist and writer

Cease the Attacks on Rafah/Gaza

 

Cultivation

 

One of my students showed me the orchards

of her family deleted, the land rewritten.

And photos of the displaced and lost.

That was a year before the invasion

 

of Gaza and the erasure of trees

down to the splinters of stories.

The granaries broken, houses

split open, and now the last refuge

 

to be raised and offered as proof

of ‘resolve’. Buzzards, sparrow-

hawks, griffons... no longer raptors

but lost to the vanishing point.

 

Erosion is policy and endgame

its intonation. The Israeli military

is attempting to rewrite definitions

of suffering. To bulldoze lexicons.

 

Closing the crossing, harrying

the edges, compressing and dispersing

the soil until it is dust or slurry.

Cultivating a ruin whose fruit is death.

 

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

 

On the Attacks in Israel by Hamas and the ‘Vengeance’ Response by the Israeli State Against Gaza

            John Kinsella

 

 

I wrote this a few days into the ‘war’. Now, weeks later, I feel I must post it. The personal nature of it is a result of my trying to come to grips with the unfathomable, and is not intended as a ‘pronouncement’. I have no more right than anyone else to express a view outside a situation other than through my own humanity and responsibility to others.

 

As pacifist my position is always very clear.

I utterly condemn the horrendous crimes of Hamas (and the entire organisation — one that has ruled through the barrel of the gun), and I understand the need for people to see 'justice' over what happened (though, for me, justice never involves more killing). I also believe the Israeli craving for vengeance is wrong, entirely out of control and fed by powerful vested interests. I deplore violence in all its forms and only care for the sanctity of people in this. All people.

 

There is no question of the colonial militarism and motivation of right-wing Israeli governments. I am fully aware of the dispossession and ongoing losses and oppression of the Palestinian people and believe this must be addressed in concrete and just ways. I believe in the right of Jewish people (and peoples) to share that space which is also their historic and spiritual homeland.

 

With all of this in mind, I deeply believe in the broader principles of shared space, in peaceful co-existence — this cannot exist under the present system of apartheid and the exclusionary control of space. I come at this as someone who refutes all notions of states and borders, and also all settler-colonialism. I have a lifelong, strong affinity with Jewish people, an association of which I am proud, and through which feel I have grown as a person. I also (always such a complicating word in the context) count friends on both ‘sides’ of the constructed divide. I also fully support the Palestinian people. I have seen direct evidence (from students and others) of the wrongs suffered by families — the loss of homes and lands, the loss of the very records of their lives.

 

I am horrified by the antisemitism I encounter in day to day life, in the press, online, and in disguised ways. I am equally horrified by the use to which some (if not many) are putting the vengeance retaliation approach within and without Israel. I am horrified by the mistreatment of the Palestinian people. I am horrified by the act of genocide the Israeli government, its war cabinet, the IDF, and the capitalist powers that support it are meting out to the Palestinian people.

 

I care for the people of Israel and the people of Gaza/Palestine and all of humanity. I care for the children and peace. I do not care for militarists and those filled with hate. People may not like my pacifist position, but I mean it and would stand between the murderers and their intended victims without lifting a hand — I speak with my body and soul. Many people I know directly and at a distance are being affected by this situation of abject horror and terror. I offer my support to all those who need it, and will never turn my back on anyone. The murder must stop immediately. This began with mass murder and continues with genocide — the blame and annihilation of a people being made guilty by association. Every code of human decency is being violated.

 

I will never agree (in any shape or form) with violence. Hamas is a violent organisation who deserve no respect on any level — they are murderers who control the people they purport to represent. The IDF murders as an act of destiny. The gap between the two is incredibly small and abstract. Flattening Gaza is NO ANSWER and becomes a murderous genocidal crime in itself. Hamas must be exposed for what they are — a destructive force to the people they purport to represent. Concurrently, the Israeli military and all those who enable their ‘vengeance’ (the so-called ‘right to self-defence’ scenario, when what is meant in the circumstances is the right to destroy people who are not attacking them) are equally culpable and pernicious. All militaries are, as are all military ‘approaches’. Always.

 

Humans need to deal with humans without violence. Humans need to share between themselves, appreciate and respect cultural difference.

 

I feel very passionately about justice and the sanctity of life. I have seen too much hate in my life and am fully committed to offering any other way through I can in my own minuscule way. I am for both Palestinians and Israelis, without regard to ‘states’, military structures, and martial control. And yes, I emphatically believe the Hamas attack was an attack against the very spirit of humanity itself, not a genuine attempt to overcome the wrongs and oppressions experienced by the Palestinian people for so long. But this grievous wrong does not justify a grievous wrong against innocent people — levelling a city is not right under any circumstances. Murdering children is murdering children. Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters are right-wing killers and haters. The sick irony is that the Israeli state ‘speaks’ to Hamas, and Hamas ‘speaks’ to them. This is the absolute tragedy of it — speaking with no conversation, only death.

 

It should be remembered that hate is never far below the surface. Here in Tübingen as this horror started to unfold, someone violated stones from a former synagogue near the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Church on Berliner Ring. In damaging stones — the death-echoes of Nazism never far below the surface — there is an expression of a willingness to damage a people. This awareness should be taken into consideration at every turn with regard to how issues and wrongs are so easily broadened into generic patterns of hatred. It is a brutal reality in itself, and a ‘spectre of death’. Concurrently, bursts of Islamophobia segue with an uncritical support of the IDF. It’s nonsensical, brutal, and diminishes all humanity.

 

There are so many people working hard across communities to bring true justice and healing. Poetry is part of this, and I praise those poets who work so hard across languages and cultures, across Arabic and Hebrew, to bring dialogue, peace, and mutual growth.

Who Can Justify This?

 Who Can Justify This?

 

Kids carrying kids out of the rubble

of a bombed building is the brutal image

of tenderness we need and don’t need to see.

 

All images gather into deluges of images,

even if it’s a dry flattened landscape. Image piled

on image — the rubble of figurative language.

 

The kid carrying the kid out of the rubble:

quickening heart synched with faltering

heart, entangled in the materials of building.

 

The ‘justification’ behind the attack

leaves kids carrying kids out of the rubble.

The constructions of war; the idiom

 

for kids carrying kids out of the rubble

            of bombed buildings.

 

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

This is a Hospital

 

Statement

 

from John Kinsella

Poem Pleading for Peace in Israel and Palestine

Elegy

Cinnyris osea, who called you 

when the day died?

Palestinian sunbird, 

bird of aspiration.

Bird annihilated sheen 

of blue-green feather-film

foraging in dry air 

and we hear you under 

these conditions, an intense

yearning for an end 

to all violence between peoples. 

Co-existence

and curve-billed sampling

of flowers which are music,

which are conversations,

which love all people

more or less the same.

Cinnyris osea, who 

called you out of the sun

when the day died?

Palestinian sunbird, call peace

over Israel and Palestine,

out of the stones. Quickly. Please.

John Kinsella

Note: the Palestinian sunbird (beautiful bird) is the national bird of Palestine (the declaration goes: because it flies across borders to link Palestinian territories). It became the national bird in 2015 due to the Israeli authorities trying to remove 'Palestine' from its naming.