GAZA and THE FINAL SOLUTION
I've seen & heard things today that even the Palestinians I know have never heard or seen until the last 24-36 hours, and I think it's very likely that Israel is implementing its extermination plan. I can only infer details of that plan, but the degree of open slaughter with ludicrously disproportionate weapons, forced evacuation, unambiguous assassination of Palestinian journalists and leaders – in short, total war against a people with no army – is unlike anything pre-"ceasefire."
I don't know if this is the first phase of IT, or the dawning culmination of IT, or how long IT is designed to last, but everything I know is telling me that this is IT. That thing, the last thing, the thing you may not have believed was possible.
Amjad asked me to send you all another written post today, to alert you to the enormous escalation of Israeli crimes and Palestinian death, and to emphasize that the window for giving any help you can manage is horrifyingly narrow.
And I need to include Rulin as well – her family is among the thousands of newly re-displaced, they don't own anything they owned yesterday (including a tent), her younger sister has been seriously wounded by IDF shrapnel, and her mother's ongoing illness and treatment ... you can imagine what that means now.
People are talking to me in "If I don't make it" terms. These are not people with a penchant for melodrama. After 16 months in hell, the circumstances that would prompt them to say "If I don't make it" are past imagining.
Aside from telling you all what they ask me to, I don't precisely feel "at a loss for words" or "unable to speak"; it's more as though whatever I could say is so starkly inadequate that it would become a species of lie, that talking is now lying, and to lie about this, and during this, would be ... well, you know what it would be.
The Palestinians I know have actually improved my estimate of humanity, at least at its heights – and in a very different way, on a very different level, I want to say the same to any of you who have been able to help. I can feel a psychotic episode coming on, so I'm terribly ill-equipped to say anything at all, much less say it well, but it means more than I can delineate too sharply at the moment.
So, again, I'll direct you to Amjad's project building tents for the displaced – and there are thousands more displaced than there were yesterday – and to Rulin's medical fund, which is now required to cover whatever necessities her family can find, because unless there's some enormous change, they're going to live while being hunted by the local agents of a Nazi bloc more powerful and vaster than even Austrian capital-R Romantics dared to dream.
I've said it elsewhere, but I feel compelled to say it again: we have reached the phase of genocide in which the list of most immediate dangers, right up there with bombs, drones, guns, includes wild dogs. People can't sleep, can't leave their children or elderly alone for even a moment, can't cross land they need to cross or even briefly settle where they need to settle, because Gaza is now full of wild dogs, and they are big and very focused, because they've been eating human corpses for a long time now, and they know what it looks like when a human being can be easily converted into a human corpse. The famine and lack of medicine now mean that Palestinians who were healthy adults 2 years ago may not be strong or fast or even lucid enough to fight off a wild dog. Or three wild dogs, or five, or nine.
Bombs, airstrikes, drones, machine guns, wild dogs.
Thank you, every one of you
M