** Accompanying Text:
If you can watch a genocide unfold in real time ...armed, bankrolled and excused by your own government ... and still turn away, then you are surrendering your place in the building of any just future.
That’s not cruelty. That’s truth. How can you be trusted?
Because history will record that we all knew. And history will remember who acted and who turned away. It’s being recorded right now.
Gaza is our moral mirror, streamed live 24/7. When we look into it, we see the machinery of empire: supremacy, extraction, exploitation, desecration ….operating not only in Palestine, but everywhere.
And we see ourselves: dehumanisation of others, our rationalisations and spiritualisations and normalisations. Our racism. Our obedience to authority. Our fear of speaking out. Our preference for comfort over conscience….. delaying
action until it’s safe, until the killing is done.
But this is the moral question of our time. An awakening. An historical bifurcation point that will be remembered for decade upon decade to come.
Will you choose to see clearly, and act while it matters? Or will you wait until the museums are built, the movies are made ….and it costs nothing to say you were against it?
The reckoning does never begin with complicit leaders: it begins with us. The people.
It begins when we refuse to be silent. To participate.
When we refuse to normalise the unthinkable. When we divest. When we boycott. When we turn toward each other instead of away.
We still have time. It’s not too late. Time to be human. Time to be worthy of the world we say we want.
The mirror of Gaza is in front of us now, and it will remember what we chose to see and who we chose to be.
(c) Fatima Bacot. All rights reserved.