We Must Purge Genocide From The Marrow Of Our Bones
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The Israeli outlet Haaretz has a new article out titled “Israeli Defense Officials: Gov’t Pushing Aside Hostage Deal, Eyeing Gaza Annexation,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Anonymous senior Israeli officials are telling the press that the government has abandoned any notion of securing a hostage deal, and is now working toward “the gradual annexation of large parts of the Gaza Strip.”
Haaretz’s sources say the full siege and other war crimes we’ve been hearing about in northern Gaza were put into effect without much planning in order to force the civilian population southward to avoid starvation and extermination, and that the Israeli military is moving forward with the operation despite knowing that it will probably get hostages in the area killed.
So there you have it. After a full year, they’re finally beginning to admit what this has always been about.
This was never about freeing hostages. It was never about getting rid of Hamas. It was never about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. It was never about mass rapes, beheaded babies, or babies cooked in ovens. It was always about stealing land from the indigenous people of Palestine.
Humanity can’t keep living like this.
When will it end? When will we stop with the land grabs and ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations? When will we stop slaughtering human beings for territory and resources? When will we finally awaken from our murderousness and greed and become a conscious species?
Yesterday I had a brief exchange with someone about Germany and its facilitation of Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. He said that because the Germans were hammered with guilt for trying to exterminate the Jews, they then threw their energy into doing “the polar opposite” with their unconditional support for Israel’s actions.
I told him the polar opposite of “trying to exterminate the Jews” is definitely not “helping a Jewish ethnostate exterminate an indigenous population.” The polar opposite of trying to exterminate the Jews would have been to transform German society into a kind, gentle, peaceful nation full of kind, gentle, peaceful people who could never stand to see anything remotely like the Holocaust ever happen again.
After the Holocaust there was a chance to do that, not only in Germany but throughout the western world. We could have let that political moment galvanize us into transforming into a just, compassionate, peaceful civilization, so firmly against racism, inequality and abuse that the seeds of any future Holocausts would immediately fail to take root. Instead we decided to set up a Zionist apartheid state and help it kill anyone it wants.
We could have expunged those forces within us that gave rise to the Holocaust, but instead we just redirected them and gave them a different job. We got rid of the Nazi Party, but we didn’t get rid of the soil within ourselves which allowed the seeds of Nazism to find purchase. We took the Third Reich out of Germany, but we didn’t take the Third Reich out of the Germans.
If we are to survive on this planet, we’re going to have to learn how to coexist peacefully with each other. These mental disorders of competition and domination have placed us on the brink of annihilation by nuclear war or environmental collapse. We can’t keep doing this anymore.
If humanity is to survive, it needs to transform. It won’t be enough to end the genocide in Gaza, we’ve got to uproot the things within ourselves which can give rise to genocide. We all live on land that was taken from other civilizations— many, like those of us here in Australia, much more recently than people in other parts of the world. We need to find a way to abandon such impulses and leave them in the dustbin of history for something healthier if we are to keep living in this world.
We’ve got to end the genocide, and we’ve got to purge genocide from the very marrow of our bones. We’ve got to get rid of everything in our society, in our governments, and in ourselves which could ever give rise to genocidal atrocities again.
We’ve got to become a kind and caring people. We’ve got to abandon the competition-based systems which drive human behavior in favor of collaboration-based ones which allow us to work together with each other and with our ecosystem for the common good of all beings. And we’ve got to get rid of anything within ourselves which stands in the way of this.
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