During 2023 – 2024, I wrote a 5-Part essay series entitled, “Who Bombs Hospitals and Inherits the Earth?” (Title taken from a quote by Fady Joudah).
In it, I undertook a spiritually-rooted investigation into the moral, political and existential crisis revealed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and as fully supported, funded and protected by the US and other partners. Blending various insights, historical context and uncompromising moral clarity, the Series exposed how the machinery of empire (supremacy, extraction, colonialism, exploitation, exceptionalism and desecration) operates not only in Palestine but across the globe and manifests in the polycrises we see everywhere.
And especially, that Gaza was a mirror and a moral litmus test for humanity.
Gaza was, and remains, a line in the sand for what we will tolerate, excuse, or actively support, not only as nations, but as individuals.
The Series challenged the spiritual bypassing and political apathy that allow atrocities to persist, insisting that what is permitted in Gaza is permitted everywhere. That there’s no way to build a New Earth without doing the deep shadow work that has manifested and metastasised as the warcimres, crimes against humanity and atrocities taking place in Gaza.
For such a ‘New Earth’, compartmentalisation, laundering, transcendence and escapism are necessary in order to rationalise, normalise and drown out the screams and to step over the bloodied, amputated and charred remains of men,
women, children and babies.
Ultimately, the Series called for a rehumanised politicsgrounded in reality, empathy, justice and a shared commitment to the survival of all life.
Journalist Caitlyn Johnstone, answering a reader’s question (“I would love to hear you explain how Palestine is the moral question of our time. Why it’s so important. How it’s related to every movement and should be a concern to everyone.”) has similar things to say:
The primary reason to placePalestine front and center as the moral issue of our time is because if we can’t sort out the morality of an active genocide backed by our own western governments, we’re not going to be able to sort out anything else. Stopping the Gaza holocaust and bringing justice to the Palestinians is the very first step toward a healthy civilization.
Palestine is the moral issue of our time for the same reason if you saw someone in your family torturing another member of your family to death, it would be the most urgent matter happening in your life at that moment. You’d have other problems in your life, but that would come first.
Let it be said, solutions are in plain view, and as underscored by International Law, International Humanitarian Law and
International Human Rights Law. The solutions are there, but the world is choosing otherwise.
How do we explain the selective empathy that allows us to care deeply for those who look like us and dismiss those who don’t?
How are we and entire societies trained to walk past or celebrate horror?
How do we explain the obedience to authority that Milgram exposed? (Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist in the early 1960s, found that ordinary people were willing to inflict what they believed to be lethal electric shocks on others when instructed by an authority figure, even against their conscience.)
How do we explain the conformity to group silence that Zimbardo showed? (Philip Zimbardo’s 1971Stanford Prison Experiment revealed how quickly people conform to oppressive roles, adopting cruelty and compliance when placed in a system that normalises abuse, and where social roles and systems quickly corrupt moral clarity and foster cruelty.)
Hannah Arendt, writing post WWII, called it the “Banality of Evil” and it happens through psychic numbing and through euphemisms like “collateral damage” that make burned children sound like logistical mishaps.
Personal and global reckoning are required….
As in, what is it in us and in what we believe that makes mass extermination of people and culture in a livestreamed genocide OK?
We’ve been here before and these same questions have been asked, and we must ask them of ourselves now.
We know that, as Omar el Akkad wrote,
"One day, when it’s safe, whenthere’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
But we also know we weren’t all against it (or other mass atrocity and injustice), and we’re not all against it even now as the darkest stage accelerates.
In not being against it and choosing to disrupt it, there’s nothing to stop re-creating this moment tomorrow, next month or in the years to come. We’re invested in other beliefs and concerns.
Amongst us, there were and are those who fully support the genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza and the West Bank. For those people, Palestinians (and all Muslims) are scum, vermin, terrorists, subhumans, human animals. Just like Jews were in Nazi Germany. They must be eliminated by ‘the civilised’ for ‘civilisation’s sake’.
This is dehumanisation 101: the psychological groundwork that makes extermination not only thinkable but righteous in the minds of its supporters.
For others, what is happening is because it’s an old Timeline collapsing or Palestinians are unawakened. Karma is invoked to blame them as deserving of collective punishment (“it’s their soul’s lesson”), or it’s their “low vibration”, or their suffering is dismissed as an illusion, or detachment and neutrality are elevated above moral outrage (“I cannot judge, only love”).
This is the sanctified form of abdication where moralcowardice dressed up as spiritual insight, ensuring that no stand need be taken and no cost personally borne.
Palestinians and those who suffer are not really seen ashuman and in need, and bypassing is elevated as wisdom because paying attention is anathema and may affect one’s enlightenment, vibration or mood.
For others still, the discomfort of moral clarity is too high a price; they seek refuge in “it’s complicated,” in whataboutism, or in the belief that someone else will act. The bystander effect in its purest form.
For others, they fear speaking up may affect their work, followers, reputation.
For others, it’s endless hand-wringing, lamenting thecomplexity of geopolitics, endlessly debating “both sides,” and pledging solidarity only once the massacres are over, when it’s safe to condemn, but never in time to act. Memes will beposted, museums visited …. when it’s safe to do so.
This is the liberal performance of virtue after the fact: eager to commemorate, to mourn publicly and to praise resistance once it is over, but unwilling to risk reputation, comfort or standing when it matters.
Yes, we have the obvious ‘monsters’ carrying out masskilling, but it’s both deceptive and inaccurate to pin all accountability for atrocity upon them. In fact, in the same way it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to prop up and kowtow to violent systems, as well as defend them.
It is system justification: defending the very structures that commit the crimes, because acknowledging their illegitimacy would shatter the illusion of order and shatter comfort and privilege.
So we simply ‘carry out orders’, whether we are silent, turnaway or do the actual killing.
Omar el-Akkad’s words predict behaviour.
Our saying something later won’t mean anything in 5-10 years’ time, when the movies come out, the awards are given, the Palestine Holocaust museums start springing up in all our ‘civilised countries’, showcasing the ones that are enabling, financing and protecting the genocide right now, those groups, influencers and communities who were silent … if we say then we were against it right now.
It won’t matter.
The thing is, we have the receipts of what people and organisations did or didn’t do. We know who the enablers were and are.
History will not confuse delayed outrage with courage, nor retroactive solidarity with resistance. The people’s tribunals will make sure of it, even if perpetrators and their government continue to threaten the International Courts.
We all knew it was taking place, live. We all know it’s still taking place, live.
The time is now to reckon with your own Soul and how you areparticipating directly or indirectly in these crimes against humanity, whether in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, the US border or elsewhere.
It is time to be honest with ourselves if we are to have anyhope of living a different future than the one we are living now
… because without that honesty, we will remain the same people we are right now…. having failed to make ‘never again’ mean anything.
Without reckoning, we will have simply rehearsed for the next atrocity, and we will play our assigned roles again.
As Caitlin also said,
If we’re the sort of society that would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of our own government and its allies, then we’re not the sort of society that can steer away from its trajectory toward dystopia and armageddon. If you’re the sort of individual who would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of your own government and its allies, then you’re not the sort of individual who can help steer our species away from disaster.
If you can’t be trusted with moral clarity now, why should you be entrusted with the future? You’re just not equipped to assist, let alone help build or steer into being a New Earth.
History shows us that the reckoning never begins with those in power; it begins with ordinary people refusing to obey, refusing to be numbed, refusing to normalise the unthinkable.
You cannot inherit the Earth with the shadows intact, with the massacring escalating and the blood still not dried on the sand.
We do not enter the New Earth by bypassing what is burningin polycrisis, but by turning toward each other.
It’s not too late to be credible, authentic and human. It’s not too late to stand up, disrupt and make a difference.
→ Explore further: [RISE UP: In Times of Great Upheaval, the Awakened Rise] — (HERE) — where we go from disillusionment to awakening with clarity and courage.
(c) Fatima Bacot. All rights reserved.