the sick reality

The mind, like any engine, has a background hum and mine has been a scream these past two months. Every morning and every night has been filled with the faces of murdered Palestinian children and babies, women and men, to say nothing of the wounded, the grieving, the wreckage of an entire people and the systems that supported their living.

To say I’ve been distressed is an understatement.

I normally am stressed, to be fair - I have a 1.5yo baby, a full-time job, numerous health issues - but to witness the mass slaughter of Palestinians in real time, alongside an avalanche of Orientalist and Islamophobic fantasies to justify it, to see the entire apparatus of the Western media and political class not only be unmoved by the mass starvation, murder, and displacement of two million Arabs, but continue arming and funding Israel at the same time, affirming at every step their support for blatant crimes against humanity is so horrific and overwhelming that all language fails.

I can only call what I’m feeling a destruction, complete and total, of the self I was before this, and every notion that decency, equality, truth, and legality have any meaning in the colonial Anglo empire. It has been, in short, the end of society or at least whatever illusory wisps remained of it; we are not just witness to this death, we are experiencing it, a cultural and spiritual and political rupture from which there is no return. It is profoundly frightening. I want to acknowledge that, this unmooring.

For two months, 2.2 million people—1.15 million children under 18, 40% under 15—have had their food supply, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity cut off. Gaza was already under an illegal Israeli blockade, has been for 16 years; the entirety of it is and has been under Israeli control. Palestinians are not allowed to control their own water supply, or electricity - that is Israeli doctrine. 95% of the water they had before this genocide entered the mass slaughter stage, was not fit for human consumption. Over 21,000 people have been murdered, some 8,000 or more of them children. The average age of the slaughtered is five.

I have said this before. So many others have said this before. What I return to, over and over again, is the complete shutdown of food, water (what little there was!), and power to the prison with over two million people in it. This is a crime against humanity, and not a single major power in the Anglosphere condemned it, or even outright called it what it is—in none of the coverage, anywhere in Western media, is this fact cited. At most, this vague blandishment is offered: “We encourage Israel to abide by international law.” This while foaming at the mouth with support for Israel, condemning protest and civil disobedience aimed at stopping the war; this while sending arms and warships to Israel. How Israel is patently NOT abiding by the law, how they are committing crimes every single day, is never discussed.

This is where the end began. The acceptance of the mass starvation of 2.2 million people, who have been illegally besieged for 16 years, and over 75% of whom were already refugees shunted off their land by Israel. I came here with the intention of writing a long and detailed demonstration of the many, many lies that Israel has spread since Oct 7th, about the violence on that day, and about the atrocities they were committing in Gaza. I don’t think there’s any point now. I have no faith in any brand media or major political party any more, but more importantly, this simple truth cuts through everything: even if every single absurd story about the Hamas attack were true—taken altogether, it’s something like savage Arabs raped everyone to death and beheaded every baby they found and put the babies in ovens and ate the babies—it still would not justify nor make acceptable this hideous, blatant genocide.

My days are filled with dead Arab children.

My nights are filled with dead Arab children.

When I look at my baby son I see them all.

Unlike the numerous deletions, retractions, admissions of error, blatant lies, repurposing of old videos, and fake translations put out by official Israeli channels; unlike the refusal to allow international journalists into Gaza, the demand to have sole permission over what can be said or shared by journalists there; unlike the muzzling of released hostages after the first batch revealed the IOF rampage that murdered many Israelis on Oct 7th; unlike the refusal of Israel to allow any independent investigation to verify its narrative and its continued assault on international human rights organisations; unlike the secret Hamas atrocity reel Israel is showing to select influencers and journalists, and the persistent coordination of Western media outlets to still broadcast Israeli talking points and use their language, all of which affirms the apartheid state’s unreliability and commitment to propaganda—we have all directly seen the mass slaughter of Palestinians every single day. In livestreams and videos and stories from Palestinians on the ground. We’ve seen their blood, their tears, their grief, their extraordinary humanity in the face of calamity, we’ve seen bombed hospital after bombed hospital, murdered baby after murdered baby…

And it hasn’t changed a damn thing.

We’ve seen Israeli official after Israeli official say they want everyone killed or removed, they want to destroy Gaza, there are no innocents there, etc., and it hasn’t changed a damn thing. We’ve seen Israeli soldiers abusing Palestinians, we’ve seen them laughing in destroyed school rooms and mocking dead kids, we’ve seen them joking as they destroy mosques, and desecrate Palestinian homes; we’ve seen viral Tiktok trend after viral Tiktok trend showing Israelis mocking Palestinians while dressed up in “Arab face”, darkening their skin, mocking the fact that they’re starving or have no water; or pretending that they’re abused Palestinian prisoners; we’ve seen poll after poll that shows Israelis support this genocide by a majority and yet their humanity is never, ever questioned. Their civility and morality is never questioned. Instead it is every single Arab in the world who is made suspect, such that even wearing the kheffiyeh is tantamount to a crime now in the West.

I don’t know what to do or say in the face of this relentless refusal, this gaslighting, this unrepentant evil. I feel sick. Every single day thousands of bombs are dropped on a defenceless civilian population - there’s no Palestinian airforce, there’s no defence against this, no way to stop and nowhere to hide - it’s just constant murder. Nothing demonstrates this more than the fact that they carpet bombed what they called “the safe area” in the south of Gaza, which they death-marched over a million Palestinians into. We also have it directly from Israeli officials, if you need their miserable word, that they have created a “mass assassination factory” with the use of AI and their intent is mass destruction and terror.

Not only has intense exposure to the racist genocidal actions and speech of Israeli officials and people not changed a damn thing, there is still, in mainstream media, an insistence on the barbarism of Oct 7th, an insistence on the imagined uniqueness of its evil—a necessary hyperbole to make of it a supernatural phenomenon, something that requires an equally supernatural response (by which I mean something that supersedes reality and demolishes all norms) and in so doing justify their genocide. All while the staggering list of Israeli lies, retractions, deleted posts and fake translations mounts like a propaganda Frankenstein. Haaretz recently published an article admitting that many of the atrocity fan-fiction stories put forward by Israeli officials were false. The headline reads “The truth is hard enough”, a demonstrably untrue statement, because if it were, the atrocity fan-fiction would not have been broadcast so relentlessly, such that it is still repeated today across mainstream television and news platforms.

Do you have any idea how vile you have to be in order to misuse your own dead like this? To misuse their spirit? To cover their murder in lies. My god, are you not revolted? Have you no sense whatsoever of the sacred? This is not to say “every claim is false”—again, I have no interest in talking about what is true and false when it clearly doesn’t matter to the absolutely disgraceful, immoral and frankly evil Western powers (among others) that are aligned with this Israeli genocide—it is to say this apartheid state is profoundly unreliable and always has been. It is also to point out how thoroughly, demonstrably clear it is that the Israeli government and its military are so far gone in their terror that they have lost the ability to recognise and care for the humanity of ordinary Israelis. We can see this in the death threats made against Israeli journalists who criticised this mass murder; we can see it in the arrests of hundreds of Israelis who dared to “consume terrorist media” or dared to express sympathy with Palestinians. We can see it in the widely reported reckless IOF crossfire that killed many Israelis on Oct 7th, and in the murder of an unarmed Israeli man who was mistaken for a Palestinian by the IOF and so killed in cold blood, in broad daylight, on camera.

To kill someone, you have to first kill the humanity in yourself. The first violence occurs within your spirit, your psyche. Likewise to dehumanise someone, you first must dehumanise yourself - you diminish your own heart. It is an incalculable tragedy. I have said before and will say again that violence is a stain on the soul and its routine presence in our lives means we are far from being civilised. And yes, this all applies to Hamas and anyone using violence for liberation from oppression—which is a legal right guaranteed under international law—or for anything else. I grieve for them, for what has been done to them, and what they have been forced to resort to in order to escape the hell that’s been made of their lives. Power is the central lens through which I view this world, and this is how I distinguish what’s occurring; the racist apartheid system and constant colonial dispossession is an atrocity machine. Who maintains it, who has the power to unmake it? This is the genesis of all the violence and it is the powerful I hold responsible for its sick outcomes.

I see the atrocity fan-fiction as a symptom of this self-dehumanisation, this psychological warping, and as a violence unto itself. Even one single lie about Oct 7th, or indeed any attack, is sacrilegious and makes a twisted mockery of the dead. Even one lie undermines entirely the real, and in so doing, harms everyone. Harms their families. That we have witnessed dozens in the past two months alone, to say nothing of the long ugly history of Israeli lies, more than justifies scepticism of every claim. Instead, we have an increasingly hysterical insistence on blind faith in the State of Israel, we have condemnation of any protest for the rights of Palestinians to not be murdered en masse as “anti-Semitic”, we have the expansion of “protest” and therefore anti-Semitism to include wearing Arab clothing, saying Arabic words, or daring to utter “Free Palestine”. This includes proposed bills in the US House of Reps that equate “anti-Zionism” with ani-Semitism, and a proposed bill in Germany that any new citizen must swear to recognise Israel’s right to exist.

The absurdity of it all is overwhelming and destabilising. Perhaps that is the point. Our political and media class insist that the desperate actions of an imprisoned people breaking out of an illegal 16-year-long siege are worse than the actions of the nuclear-armed superpower that runs the prison, as if we don’t have decades of evidence demonstrating that Israel has committed every imaginable atrocity, including those they claim occurred on October 7th. As if we don’t have constant evidence of their atrocities these past two months. As if there haven’t been numerous! occasions where they murdered more than 1000 Palestinians—the current, revised number of Israelis killed on October 7th is “around 1000”, which is also the number of Palestinians being murdered daily by Israel. But no, the colonial powers insist that only the convicts can commit evil and every action by the prison guards is just.

It is deranged, depraved, and evil.

Do I need to draw out the connection to the carceral police state? Would you listen? I don’t know. I’m tired of debating with myself the point or pointlessness. The pervasiveness of this cynicism feels too much like self-defeat, too much like an aid to the enemy, who, to be clear, is anybody who supports this horrific invasion and mass murder of innocent people unjustly oppressed for decades. It includes Saudi Arabia. It includes much of the Arab world, those pliant, client states of the US, may they all rot for their cowardice. I want to take this time to write these words, to honour the pain, to the name the destruction of the self, the immolation of society’s illusions, the total death of the sham democracies that maintain the capitalist death cult busy poisoning the world and all of us to death.

My days are filled with murdered Palestinian children.

My nights are filled with murdered Palestinian children.

When I look at my baby son I see them all.

May God have mercy on us, and may Falastin be free.

Salaam,
Omar