This has to stop

A rant

War is hell. That's what they say when we talk about the dead babies. The burning bodies. The dismembered children. The journalists, medics, and teachers who were targeted and killed. Sniped in the head. Bombed. Crushed. Burned. Mutilated. They say "war is hell". But when we talk about October 7th, oh, that requires so much more careful thought and consideration. To dismiss the deaths of Israelis so flippantly is unconscionable. These are human beings you're talking about, not Palestinians. How dare you dismiss their suffering with platitudes. You must hate Jews. You are an antisemite. But wait, I said Israelis. Why are you bringing Jews as a whole into this? Aren't you the one who gets up in arms whenever Zionism is conflated with Judaism? You swear they aren't one and the same, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is antisemitic. And yet here you are, conflating them. Passing resolutions through Congress that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. That criticizing WHAT YOU CALL the Jewish state for genocide is somehow anti-Jewish. Make it make sense. It is true that war is hell. What happened on October 7th was hell on earth for the people who were injured, killed, kidnapped to Gaza or had loved ones who suffered that fate. Approximately 1200 people, about 3/4 of whom were "non-combatants". I'm sorry for using fractions, I know that in the west the preferred way to write it as "most of whom were noncombatants". But words matter, and in my opinion "most" conveys a different conception of how many. Maybe it's splitting hairs, but it seems important. Especially when western journalists are quite careful not to use such opinionated language when describing the dead in Gaza. We watch videos of bombs falling on markets full of women and children and the headline suggests that it is unknown how many of them were Hamas terrorists, but in a nation where military service is mandatory we are to believe that a minority were combatants. What even is a combatant, anyway? Do you have to pick up a gun and shoot in the direction of the other to be a combatant, or is it enough that you are an active duty military person? Because it seems to me that active duty military personnel are legitimate targets in war, regardless of whether they are carrying a gun at the time. You'll say there was no war on October 6th but history proves you wrong. Gaza had been under siege for nearly two decades. Extreme restrictions on travel, access to food and goods, etc. We all know the story. We are asked to believe that the only reasonable course of action for 2.3 million people, tens of thousands who were born in captivity, was to mate, grow old, and die in a cage they did nothing to deserve. And when some of them finally break out and do horrible things, a hell unknown anywhere else on earth is rained on them for going on two years now. It's obscene, but I'm told the Israelis had no choice. October 7th proved to most of them, even the so-called peace-loving left, that in fact the only solution is the final one. 82% of Israelis in a recent poll support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I don't even like saying 'ethnic cleansing' anymore because it sounds so anodyne. They want the Palestinians gone. They don't necessarily WANT them all killed, they aren't monsters after all. But they should definitely be pushed entirely off the land of their ancestors once and for all. Even those few who aren't motivated by hate and spite support it "for their own good". After all, Gaza is literally a pile of rubble now. Not exactly an ideal place to raise a family right? It would be better for them to live somewhere else. Get a fresh start. How about Egypt, a regime famous for its support of Palestinians. Or Syria, where the new Al-Qaeda government has pledged support for Israel? Or Lebanon, which already has a love-hate relationship with the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were displaced in '48 and '67, and live in camps in a country that disallows them political and economic agency? All of this is irrelevant anyway, because they don't want to leave. Israel is going to have to kill them all, and by all accounts the world governments are willing to let them. The Israeli society is rotten to the core, the government is beyond corrupt, and the United States under the Trump regime is fully mask-off in their commitment to supporting this travesty. Liberal democracy has apparently run its course. What comes next, for all of us, is either liberation or enslavement.

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Apologies for sending another post so soon after the last one, and for the wall of text. I usually put a lot more effort into making it clear and legible but I wasn’t actually writing this for publication. I have a daily practice of writing 750 words “stream-of-consciousness” every morning, inspired by the idea of “Morning Pages” from “The Artist’s Way”, and this is what dumped out of my brain this morning. I usually find myself hopping around to different topics during this exercise, but apparently not today. Normally I would just file this away but I feel compelled to share it today. Thanks for understanding!