Israel/Palestine

I was sombrely watching this shouting match on tv. I am in the Global South and was sardonically watching a rightwing nutcase and this blah, tepidly sort of left person debating this war that is so far from us. This was an instances where both sides seemed to be cynically exploiting Israel and Palestine respectively for their ends (that’s most politics on the ground here).

The right wing nut described a legitimately horrific, verified rape by Hamas. But then used it as an excuse to blow off the horror in Gaza with shocking, dismissive callousness.

I was reminded of this Tyee writer Andrew Nikiforuk whose columns I like (a mild religiosity aside ;-/). He talked about how authoritarianism is on the rise and working people are really just treated like chess pieces by vested interests (I am paraphrasing what he said). And how it destroys your imagination so you can’t understand what it must feel like to be a child walking through the rubble in Gaza.

I was reminded of this image I saved . It has a strange, haunting and nightmarish quality to it - a solitary child walking through what looks like the ruins of some sort of nursery..

It’s kind of eerie to look back at it. That event (that horrific Hamas attack) changed the world so much and played a significant role in our dystopian present.




It reminded me vaguely of this picture I saved from Antoine St Exupery’s “The Little Prince” oddly:


I wonder who that child is and what happened to him.

There was this piece in The New Yorker by this doctor Clayton Dalton who generally seems like a cool person. It again has tragic imagery of children in a war zone:


This war is a horror that needs to end. I honestly doubt its friends of Israel/Palestinians/the Muslim or Jewish community wanting this continuing. Just war profiteers, anti semites and Islamophobes.
It’s clearly giving the progresive Jewish diaspora PTSD going by Forward etc.