Who is Hamas? Any child who hasn’t run away

THE Jabalia Camp massacre changes everything. We are dealing with a criminally insane entity called Israel backed by a criminally hypocritical superpower. Some people ask whether the genocide in Gaza is unique and unprecedented or par for the course of human history. Others feel the question diminishes the evil perpetrated against the Palestinians which we witness unbearably and helplessly every day.

What will we do? That is the question we must insistently ask as we look at ourselves and at each other. There are always things that can be done. So, can we live in self-contempt by accepting we can do nothing? We may be poor and weak, and we have to survive. But we are answerable to Allah. Otherwise, we are less than human.

‘Chutzpah’ is a Yiddish word meaning audacity or unmitigated nerve like when a man murders his own parents and asks the court to have mercy on an orphan! The most evil version is when victims resisting systematic genocide, planned over a century, and implemented over half a century, are themselves accused of genocide, and mercilessly subjected to it.

This is a product of settler colonialism. In the case of the US and Israel, it has involved the effective elimination of the native population, the enslavement of kidnapped and transported populations, perpetual war at home and abroad, the establishment of a garrison state on faraway land stolen from its inhabitants in pursuit of global hegemony, the construction of national narratives inventing and inverting history, and elevating predator corporate capitalism into a national and civilisational ideology that has taken organised human existence to the brink of extinction,........

© Dawn