My Oddbox is delivered overnight and a few industrious ants get inside. Normally it’s just a couple of them and I manage to unload the contents – a mix of rescued fruit and veg – before taking it into the garden for the ants to escape into the grass. Not today. Today they run for it – and there’s a lot more of them – and end up all over my kitchen counter. I have no choice but to kill them. A few escape to the floor, still, so I have to quickly squish them with my slipper.
I feel bad.
I don’t actually like killing insects.
I don’t LIKE them, sure, but I don’t like killing them, either.
***
I start thinking of Gaza. I never don’t think of Gaza these days. I think about how the people get trapped and killed there under collapsing buildings destroyed by US-made and UK-guided bombs. How they run towards food in the so-called humanitarian zones – more like death traps – only to be shot at and killed by IDF and American soldiers. Crushed under the boot of the empire.
The British did it in Ireland, they did it in India. The Germans did it in Namibia. Most of European countries did it all across the world to anyone they deemed different, or an inconvenience to their imperialistic plans.
Why are we still surprised they – we! – are helping do it in Gaza? The only thing our “leaders” have learned in the past few hundred years is not to announce their intentions, but instead issue strongly-worded letters of condemnation to each other, and get someone else do the dirty work. Colonialism is alive and well.
***
My neck still hurts. I can’t turn my head properly. There’s a muscle there somewhere that got twisted or a nerve trapped and I don’t seem to be able to undo it. I start thinking about all the tears that I have not cried and how maybe my body is telling me to cry them, finally.
But the tears don’t come.
They are buried deep inside under the boot of colonialism, too, that tells us grief is wrong, feelings are wrong, speaking up is not allowed.
***
Today is Sunday, and Israel has generously (I’m being sarcastic here) agreed to a “humanitarian pause”. This morning, a few aid trucks are allowed into Gaza. I see videos of starving people surround them, hoping for a bit of food.
I know that eating too much after being starved is dangerous but I like my facts straight so I do a search for “eating after starving”.
My first result? A help line. The kind that you get if you google suicide.
A medical website lists all the dangers of the refeeding syndrome. They range from muscle weakness (if you have any muscle tissue left) to cardiomyopathy, to liquid in lungs to amnesia to coma. Eat too much, too quickly, or the wrong kind of food, and that food could kill you just like hunger could.
There are no fully functioning hospitals left in Gaza. The medical professionals that are left – those not yet killed or kidnapped by the Zionists – are starving themselves.
Our leaders know all this. They know a few trucks of rice and flour aren’t going to save people. That it’s not enough. They know mobile hospitals and medical teams and the total end of the siege is what’s required.
This is all theatre. All part of the final solution. Just like the strongly worded letters they write to each other.
***
One of my old Instagram posts went mildly viral last week. In it, I provided a step-by-step guide to starting to speak up on Gaza. I was being sarcastic. There was only one step: just speak. Just say that genocide is bad. Duh.
Something shifted in the collective consciousness. People were urging others to speak.
Why has the tide turned now? And not when a year and a half ago Hind Rajab – a six year old girl trapped in a car with her dead family – was killed by over 300 IOF bullets? Not when another girl’s body was photographed hanging from a side of a building, shredded in half? Not when several premature babies where left to starve and rot in their incubators? Not when – in October 2023 – the Israeli officials announced they are cutting off food and water to the beseiged population, and Keir Starmer said in a radio interview that it was ok for them to do so? It was all over our tiny little handheld computers for two years. We all knew what was happening.
I see people who were silent for two years, who told me they are not willing to get political on social media, to finally start saying that starving people is wrong. That it’s a moral failing of our generation. What’s changed? How many dead children is too many? It was 17,000 of kids over a year ago. It was never political. It was always about our humanity.
I see art consultants and brands and celebrities finally post condemnation of their social feeds – or interview those who have been vocal from the start. Some of them are genuine, finally getting the courage to speak. Others are making a calculated decision, realising that their previous silence will now be toxic for their brand, capitalising on the work and sacrifices that others have made. I knew it would happen. It disgusts me.
***
“How did we get here?” some wonder.
With silence. With your silence in the last two years. And with our wilful ignorance in the preceding decades.
Not just in Gaza, but in the US, in the UK, in Germany, as your own civil rights are being eroded. Because too many have considered the Gaza “thing” too political, too far away, happening to people who didn’t look like us. And then the imperial boomerang came back, as it always does. And it’s not going to stop until we stop it.
I’m glad that more people are speaking, yes. It is needed.
But it’s too late for too many. 400,000 or more people too late.
And if you’re feeing guilty – good. I still do.
Guilt is a useful emotion when turned into action. When you learn from it and the next time you don’t wait until it’s too late to do something, to speak up on injustice.
I hope for many it’ll be the start towards the journey of learning – really learning – about colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and interconnected liberation struggles. On the road of deep reflection and taking a moral inventory of our own actions and inaction and the privileges that allow us to turn away when the world is on fire. Towards the work that it takes to build a better world for our children – for all children are our children.
I hope Palestine is your red pill just like it was for me.