The war on Gaza is NOT complex, it is simple and it is tragic
JVL Introduction
Here Tanushka Marah writes movingly about how straightforward what is happening in Gaza right now. A Palestinian woman who saw 200 people demonstrating for a ceasefire in Brighton station as she came off her train was moved to tears; she had just lost family in Gaza and she asks “Why do we have to stand in train stations convincing people that Palestinians should be allowed to live?”
“Some of us older ones will spend our Saturday nights listening to Ilan Pappe and Ghada Karmi but my daughter’s friends are getting their information on TikTok and coming to the same conclusions. Because. It is not complex. It is simple. What is happening is morally wrong. It is hell. It is despair. It is what every moral theory, religion, cautionary tale, law and society warns against. This is the worst of humanity. This is the ‘never again’ moment in history and people are turning away and letting it happen.”
This article is reproduced with the kind permission of Middle East Eye; it is not available for republication.
LL
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Mon 12 Feb 2024. Read the original here.
Gaza war: Dear white liberals, genocide is not complicated
Faced with having to recognise UK complicity in Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza, it is easier to hide behind a smokescreen of complexity
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Brilliant article. Thank you for speaking the truth . We have to keep stating these truths over and over again.
The colossal elephant in the room is capitalism. These articles are themselves “neutral”. So as not to upset anyone, capitalism is excluded from the discussion. It is like an equation with one of the factors excluded. How the hellcl is one supposed to solve it?! It’s ridiculous. Every article is meticulously crafted so as to be completely anodyne. If the source of a given problem is excluded, how can there be a solution? You people need to get serious.
What a good article. In the second bit of MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, the bit that isn’t usually quoted, he lays into the white liberals for their ‘balanced’ view, which effectively undermines the progressive cause. Where is the ‘balance’ between coexistence and genocide? Coexistence for some? Just a little bit of genocide?
I apologise. There’s a lot of misinformation about, and I don’t want to add to it. May I correct what I said in my previous post, written from (imperfect) memory. MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ peroration comes at the end of his speech, not the beginning. It’s a warm sentiment that liberals and even conservatives can feel good about, forgetting the rest. The critical bit comes earlier, when King makes it very clear that what it needed is real, material change, not just pious hope. King says, ‘There are those who ask…when will you be satisfied?…No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until Justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ He had already criticised, some time earlier, ‘that white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice’.