On this day in particular, I would like to express my deepest sympathies for the victims of Israeli murderousness over the past year.
On this day in particular, I would like to mourn the thousands upon thousands of children who have been killed by western-supplied bullets and bombs in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon over the last twelve months.
On this day in particular I would like to express my sincerest condolences to the Palestinian parents who have had to bury their children, or pieces of their children, or bags of shapeless carnage they’ve been told were their children — if those parents are still alive themselves.
On this day in particular I would like to lift up my heart to the people who are being ethnically cleansed from northern Gaza right at this very moment, and the people in southern Lebanon who are being subjected to daily Israeli massacres.
I wish I could bring myself to express sympathy for other groups on this particular day, like the Israelis who were killed in the Hamas attack one year ago. But I think there’s been enough of that. I really do.
Sympathy for Israel has been used over this past year to manufacture consent for the slaughter of mountains of human beings in advancement of land grabs and military agendas that were planned long before the seventh of October 2023. The sympathy which Israel received after the Hamas attack was immediately weaponized in advancement of those agendas, and has been weaponized every single day since.
When someone is using a weapon to hurt people, a good person will take their weapon away, and won’t give them any more weapons. This is true of actual, physical weapons like the ones the western empire has been pouring into the Israeli war machine, and it is true of the weaponized sympathy that Israel apologists have been using to justify its genocidal atrocities.
Expressing sympathy for Israel on this particular day would be like expressing sympathy for a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy who is poisoning her children in order to garner sympathy and attention from her community. That sympathy — which would normally be a very healthy response to the deaths and trauma of others — is in this case the actual problem.
And even if this were not the case, Israel has received more than enough sympathy already. It is an extensively documented fact that the western press have been vastly more sympathetic toward the Israeli victims of the Hamas attack than they have been to Israel’s victims in Gaza, despite the victims of Israeli atrocities being orders of magnitude greater in number. This discrepancy in sympathy is so extensive that it can only be called journalistic malpractice.
So on this day in particular I will be expressing sympathy for the populations upon whom Israel has inflicted many, many times more death and trauma than it received one year ago — and for those populations only.
The Hamas attack was a response from a desperate colonized people against a tyrannical occupying oppressor, and many of the Israelis who were killed on that day are known to have been killed by the Israeli military and its barbaric “Hannibal directive” of murdering its own people to prevent their being taken hostage. Not another word of sympathy needs to be expressed toward Israel for this, here or anywhere else.
So on this day in particular I do not express sympathy toward Israel — in fact, I condemn it.
I condemn Israel’s bombing of hospitals. I condemn Israel’s assassination of journalists. I condemn Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilian buildings known to be packed full of children. I condemn Israel’s deliberate killing of humanitarian aid workers. I condemn Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war and extermination. I condemn Israel’s systematic rape and torture of Palestinian prisoners. I condemn Israel’s practice of murdering children and other noncombatants with snipers. I condemn Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territories.
I condemn Israel for bombing an orphanage in Gaza City last week. I condemn Israel for killing five year-old Hind Rajab and her family, and killing medical workers who tried to come to her rescue. I condemn Israel for knowingly targeting a World Kitchen convoy and killing seven aid workers. I condemn Israel for assassinating Refaat Alareer. I condemn Israel for bulldozing a dead man into the dirt like a piece of garbage, unknown and unaccounted for, like God knows how many others. I condemn Israel for the birth of the acronym WCNSF (Wounded Child, No Surviving Family) in Gaza’s medical facilities. I condemn Israel for making me learn what the insides of a dead child look like, and reminding me every motherfucking day for the last year. I condemn Israel for all the tortured, thirsty, lonely, drawn-out deaths of all the countless people buried alive under the rubble of Gaza.
On this day in particular I stand in solidarity with the victims of Israeli atrocities, which are being facilitated by the globe-spanning western empire under which I live. I extend my deepest sympathy to those victims, and my sincerest apologies for failing to do more to stop this nightmare.
Re: Oct 7 message from Caitlin Johnstone on the weaponisation of sympathy
on October 7, 2024, 10:41 pm