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