Like a lot of you, I've spent the past couple of weeks in a mental state I don't really know how to codify because I have never been witness to an ongoing genocide in broad daylight. I've been unable to process the total reality of it because I do not think humans were meant to. The repeated attempts for my brain to do so has drained it of its energy and I've spent days upon days barely able to put a workday together because the rest of my time is spent staring into space in abject horror.
I've felt powerless. I have no say in what happens. People we (ideologically, for some literally) did not elect and who do not represent our values take the world stage and proclaim we did and they do, saying they support a state that willingly lies, bombs hospitals and refugee centres, murders journalists, deprives a controlled populace access to basic supplies, and commits war crimes at a rate so blistering that calling them "crimes" seems wholly inadequate. Those leaders take the money we pay in taxes not to redistribute it amongst social programs we need but to purchase weapons to bomb Arabs because there's a trade relation somewhere that's deemed more important than a human life. They do this in our name, repeatedly, and are held unaccountable because justice is anything but and democracy is a lie.
I do not support the state of Israel. Fuck the state of Israel, fuck its government, fuck the IDF, fuck every Zionist, and fuck anyone who supports the occupation of Palestine and the inhumane control of its people.
I have nothing but love and compassion for every anti-Zionist Jewish person as they watch atrocities committed in their names. I'm so many layers removed; I can't imagine the weight of being directly associated with it.
A few days ago, our Prime Minister (I'm Canadian) posted his support for Israel and their actions "in accordance with international law", deftly ignoring that Israel has very openly done the exact opposite of this for weeks. Worse is every American who's had to watch their senile hateful President speedrun the most reprehensible comments, openly dehumanizing Palestinians and pledging billions to aid a country murder children. Seeing my PM stand alongside this monster is infuriating. Not because I hold any respect for that position or for my government or for my country in an nationalist kind of way, but because it's said in done in the name of all of us. It makes my skin crawl. I seethe in anger that anyone would do support anything even remotely close to this absurd act of depravity. Of nightmares unimaginable even to the most twisted minds. To use such a position of power to declare us all morally aligned is biblically evil.
But again, I am powerless. They will not see this post. They will not see the shortened version I make on Twitter. They are cowards acting with impunity believing that the world is a delicate power structure to be maintained like a series of spinning plates. "This is just the cost of war" we're told over as thousands upon thousands of Palestinian civilians (and counting) are hunted and killed. As Adam Johnson concisely put it in his article in The Nation:
Israel is an occupying military power on land that, under international law, isn’t its land. What’s happening in Gaza right now is not a traditional war in any meaningful sense. Israel’s pummeling of a civilian population counts as “defending itself” only under the most Bronze Age moral logic of collective punishment.
In the end, the only power I have is this. To write this and to redistribute some of the money I have to the only just cause in this situation. I have no control over the income the government takes from me. They choose to use that money to abet atrocities in the name, and only in name, of peace. Peace for one side, a side that has spent its entire existence oppressing, controlling, and killing a helpless population. All I can do at this point is spend the rest in angered protest.
1. "erica, why did you censor the amounts in your receipt" because the amount isn't important. it's a shittance of a pittance compared to how much our collective governments provide in support of an apartheid regime. also, like, i don't know you and don't need you knowing what my income is precisely.
2. "erica you didn't provide sources for your claims" this isn't a report, do your own homework. i've claimed what i've witnessed with my own fuckin eyes for weeks. you'll find dozens of articles from all walks corroborating it.