jen ☽

The old world is no longer dying, it is dead. There is no going back to how things were after this genocide has been live-streamed in high definition and Technicolour for the world to see and our leaders to endorse. The bloodthirsty status quo has been revealed to too many people, and some cats will simply not go back into their bags. I know what the inside of skulls look like now. I know how bodies burn and how limbs come off. I know that children never look more devastatingly innocent than when they’ve been killed by a vicious army using the world’s most advanced weaponry. I know this because I’ve seen so many of them now—so many more than the sum of all the living children I will likely ever know. I know how much pain a person can bear and still exist in this world—just ask any Palestinian still alive. There are so many images I will never forget that everything outside of Gaza seems as meaningless as what colour socks I wear. But it’s not just the horrors of the moment—those horrors aren’t new. In spite of the increased severity, Palestinians have known these horrors for longer than I’ve existed. It’s what this horror means, as well. It means that any single tyrant can murder any of us at will with our entire families, neighbourhoods and communities and world leaders will not act to stop them. It means that savages in suits can kill us all with advanced drones and we can share the corpses of our children with billions of people, and the media will excuse it, scapegoat our kin and divert attention away by any means necessary. It means the legal apparatus set up in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent another Holocaust from occurring is meaningless, because the very nations who ratified it in law will ignore its clear imperatives and even subvert and attack those who try to enforce it. In this moment, Israel’s actions have cost the entire world more than anyone can quantify, and the depraved and twisted Western coalition that has supported the Israeli regime has ensured that cost is deep and that we all must bear it. We will either drift further into chaos and warfare that will touch us all, or we will achieve material change that denounces and fundamentally alters the mechanics of power—those that currently deem the blood of tens of thousands of children an insufficient currency for purchasing peace. This, I believe, is the great battle of our time, and it’s not going away. The old world is dead, that’s for sure, and the monsters are fully in control. The question is, what can we do about it?