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

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

Stop the Carnage - Stop the War - Stop the Attacks on Gaza - Permanent Ceasefire - No More Violence - Leave Rafah in Peace!

 

Rafah

 

A city on the edge of catastrophe.

Designated ‘safe zone’ where,

 

defying the limits of space,

over a million people

 

have been herded.

Choke point. Crossing

 

to nowhere. Edge

of annihilation.

 

Such moments

too many in power

 

across the globe

want to make history

 

before and as they happen.

To relegate. To regret

 

after the fact,

after massacres

 

have been totted up

and converted to statistics.

 

 

            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.

The terrorism of states

Written by John, posted & shared by Tracy

The machine of the state is essentially militaristic. The state of Israel is a fully military colonial machine. The destruction of the Palestinian people is its core aim — to create space for itself, to assuage its own guilt at its mistreatment of those who do not ‘enjoy’ the privileges that come with participating in its statehood (and who resist its expansion/consolidation), and to ensure its own survival.

All states defend their own existences, and the existence of Israel has its obvious historical reason for being (and in some ways the psychology of its aggressions is understandable, if contradictory — but being understandable does not make it right). It’s the idea and reality of the state itself that engenders the brutality of a modern Israel, and any other state for that matter. Australia, the United States of America, Russia (and its so-called ‘federation’), the United Kingdom, China, France... right down to the smallest island nation-state, are part of the same picture.

Human brutality is not isolated to ethnicity, creed, or belief, but to the abrogation of self and community empowerment to the centralised militaristic ‘protection’ of the state. Every soldier is made a murderer by the actions of the state. Every soldier who participates is responsible, whatever they do or don’t do. It is a collective guilt and a collective injustice. Participants — voters, party officials, those who pretend it’s not their concern but continue to benefit from the state’s military actions — are equally culpable.

Non-violent resistance is the only way — and as poets, every poem we write should be a form of resistance, an act of linguistic disobedience. States murder more than they protect. And they protect to perpetuate their own existences. Disarm Israel. Disarm all states. Disarm all individuals. Weapons are a violation of all people’s rights. Until people who are not in the killing zones understand and resist the state, the killing will continue. For most, it’s a moment of indignation with the news headlines; then they move on with their lives. Killing knows no providence.

To make it clear — on a micro level, both Jewish and Palestinian peoples (and any other peoples for that matter) can co-exist (and have the right to co-exist) more justly without the machine of the state (Israeli, Palestinian, or any other form of state), and without the tools of conflict. The abolition of all states is the only avenue to justice, liberty, and fraternity. Ultimately the existence of any state means the oppression of those whom it perceives as threatening it, or acting against its interests, and, indeed, its own citizens.