Israel's Crimes, Al Shifa Hospital
Jesus fucking christ, dispatch #9
I’m amazed that we are still here, 180 days in. I’m astounded that it keeps getting worse, that the descriptions of what happened at Al Shifa hospital are the worst we’ve heard come out of Gaza yet. My friend and comrade Nicki Kattoura wrote yesterday, “After seeing the footage from Al Shifa there’s nothing more to say and everything more to do.” Every day it feels like a new horror and a new beginning.
A few days ago the IDF left Al Shifa Hospital, it was reported that more than 300 Palestinians had been martyred. For The Nation, Linah AlSaafin wrote, “The scenes of destruction, crushed dead bodies, and hollowed-out burned buildings at what used to be Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Medical Complex are nothing short of apocalyptic.”
To see a hospital, the life source of any community, a place generally sacrosanct in the eyes of international law, to use this place as a hunting ground was one of many direct fuck yous Israel has given the rest of the world, and to witness this continues to be an apocalyptic encounter. They have no desire to play fairly, let alone play morally, as they, the so-called “moral army” likes to tell us. While members of the Knesset are continuing to state there is no such thing as a Palestinian, Biden is telling us the death toll in Palestine isn’t as high as the number of dead bodies being found, and according to former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, “not one” Palestinian civilian was killed at the recent murderous rage orchestrated by the IDF at Al Shifa. “To say that such a claim stretches credulity is a vast understatement,” writes AlSaafin.
Especially when by all available evidence, the IDF “unleashed a vicious, brutal attack on patients, medical personnel, and thousands of displaced civilians sheltering inside the hospital grounds.” By the way, just so we’re clear, all of these things are genocidal, and prove genocidal intent. Increasingly, it feels like Zionists have no (never had any) shame, and no history, except the Holocaust’s memory they keep exploiting - yet seem to have no moral reverence for. When they say “Never Again” I really wonder what they’re thinking… logically… about that. How can you question a death toll that you’re participating in when Holocaust denialism is such a huge industry? Absolutely zero shame!
Already, the testimonies from survivors and witnesses coming out of Al Shifa are so brutal, it’s hard to believe how people are surviving: “The air thick with the stench of rotting bodies, people only able to identify the corpses of their loved ones by the clothes they had been wearing, stray cats and dogs eating at some of the bodies strewn in and around the complex, bodies crushed by Israeli tanks, severed limbs and heads, and the execution of dozens of Palestinians with their hands and feet zip-tied.”
If you’d like visual proof of the carnage, to see it with your own eyes, click all the links in the previous paragraph or I’d recommend going to Mosab Abu Toha’s IG or Eye of Palestine, and a lot of the documentation is there, right from the source. First live-streamed genocide - a first of its kind! And, here we are, still debating if it’s a genocide… How sickening. Yet this is what the Israeli state wants us to be doing, debating over semantics, as it continues to distract us. The below tweet explains that this is a part of the pattern of distraction. Confusion is seeded and uncertainty spreads speculation, a decades-old ploy by the Israelis, to dodge accountability. Also a true and trusted sign of narcissism!
I love this TikTok by @erinraii who talks about how white supremacy is just narcissism, and Zionism is as well. There’s a screenshot below of the Venn diagram, but this will also take you to the video directly. It’s helpful and clarifying to see how detailed she is in her explanation and breakdown of the parallels here, just so we can continue to bear witness.
I have noticed that with most narcissists I encounter, like my mother, there is this utmost obsession with one’s own pain that usurps everyone else’s experiences, always. It’s a strange thing to witness in someone, let alone an entire nation of people who simply feel entitled to… everything. Even to another person’s life, as well as their death. Is this power, or is this a lack of humanity?
According to Reuters, “Al Shifa, the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital before the war, was one of the few healthcare facilities that had been partially operational in the north of enclave before the raid. Palestinian officials called the assault on a hospital treating severely wounded patients a war crime. Israel says Hamas deliberately operates among vulnerable civilians.”
Can you imagine how cold-hearted you have to be to claim that it’s Hamas’ fault you’re bombing a hospital? Not that you’re bombing it because there are wounded and injured people there, that there are thousands of scared people taking shelter. For years, Israel has been claiming that it would never even bomb a hospital, even though it’s been doing it and lying about doing it for years. Remember how a few months ago it spent weeks - WEEKS - trying to convince the general public that it would never, ever bomb a hospital… and then… it turned the same hospital into this.
It’s what Jehad Abusalim wrote in the above tweet - confusion is seeded and uncertainty spreads speculation. What does a narcissist hate more than anything? Accountability. What’s so concerning when a state does this? It lies. But when the lies are so big and so callous, and therefore so self evident, what do we do to stop what is happening?
I don’t know what else I have to show or say to convince people of this genocide and I’m realizing that so many people are either uninterested in the truth or truly incapable of holding the total reality of it, so they prefer to live in blissful ignorance. I know there’s no one thing that we can do to individually stop this genocide (except you know, some things 👀) but I know there’s A LOT we can do collectively. As I watch people stop caring, essentially accepting this sick reality, I wonder if outrage is so undermined because the rich or the unaffected just desperately want to get on with their lives - and they want you to shut up about whatever you’re mad about so they can get on with their lives. Or maybe, after a while, they just stop engaging with you. Because they can just… turn you off… they can silence, unfollow or block you. And use their little mute buttons. Money affords you ignorance… but the reality is being ignorant is so fucking boring.
I mourn this cruelty. I am sickened by how we are allowing this. We are just watching this lying and pettiness this scrambling of international law this truly abysmal disrespectful display for the rest of humanity… I can’t even fathom what we are collectively ingesting right now, even if some of us are in the delusion. As the Earth continues to collapse because of this war-mongering, I wonder what it will truly take to break this pattern. Or will the men just truly drive us into extinction? That would be fitting, and maybe the most accurate description of the failures of masculinity… Men… can they actually stop wanting to murder people????
We have so much hubris. The pandemic came and took us to our knees and people are still here, just a few years later, fully committing mass war crimes, invoking Old Testament and Biblical texts thinking they are just untouchable… Lord have mercy. How can anyone who believes in God commit such harm? Such destruction? To a hospital?! Is this what it means to be chosen? How have we come so far from ourselves?
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If you didn’t know, Palestinians are facing mass famine, which is obviously… the point. After Israel strategically destroyed UNWRA, accusing it of being run by Hamas (or that specific members had affiliations with Hamas) Israel then told an outraged world that they would allow World Central Kitchen to prevent the mass starvation of the Gazan people… and then two days ago they bombed World Central Kitchen…
As Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote on his Instagram, “When you are committing genocide, no death is unintentional.” In the same post’s caption, he explained further, “Yesterday the IDGAF killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen traveling on an approved route in marked vehicles. They were killed in three drone strikes over the course of a few kilometers, with survivors fleeing to successive vehicles that were then also destroyed.”
An approved route! This is the same thing that happened with Hind Rajab - the 6-year-old who had to stay in a car with her murdered family members for hours - while an ambulance, that was approved to rescue her, was bombed en route by the IDF. She was eventually also murdered. It’s like the IDF are playing some sick video game… Zomi Frankcom, an Australian national and World Central Kitchen senior manager, and another person known as Chef Oli were said to be some of the seven people who were recently also murdered by the IDF. This is a video of them on the ground just before.
It feels like such a barbaric way to kill a people - a long protracted game of waiting, of starvation, while Netanyahu and Israelis en masse - everyone from Israeli TikTokers, rappers, and politicians are calling to genocide Palestinians… while by and large the most prominent Israelis are silent (Yes there’s Ilan Pappé and Miko Peled, but I mean outside of like the 5 Israeli leftists) about their government… they just continue to be silent. Which, at this point, is completely reprehensible. And it’s very, very interesting to witness.
Like many people around the world, I was taught extensively about the Holocaust, in my predominantly white public girls high school in Sydney, and I always had rage toward the German public’s disregard for genocide and always felt disgusted by their incredulity. “The banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt would write about Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer and official of the Nazi party, as she reported his trial in Jerusalem years later. I wonder what Arendt would say about the egregious display of evil we are witnessing at the hands of Zionists - the saturation of their glee, superimposed in HD, forever living on our phones, marked singularly - by their lack of humanity.
I also wonder what we would do, societally, if Germans were making TikToks about mass murdering Jews, and how would we feel if German nationals and celebrities and politicians went onto their television shows and talked about how there is no such thing as a Jew, what would we do then? There are about 15 million Palestinians in the world, give or take, that’s about the same size of the Jewish population, as well. When you begin to see these mirror reflections, how history repeats itself - even sometimes at the hands of its victims, it really puts things into perspective.
The Guardian reported, in a piece entitled, “Israel’s attempt to destroy Unrwa is part of its starvation strategy in Gaza,” that “Destroying UNWRA thus furthers the Netanyahu government’s starvation strategy for Gaza. Since the siege it imposed on 7 October, the Israeli government has been letting in just enough food to avoid widespread deaths but nowhere near enough to alleviate hunger or to dim the prospects of famine.” This is already after a blockade that Gaza has been under since 2007. Since the blockade, it stopped chocolate, laptops… and in some cases, due to the discretionary nature of it all, it has even blocked diapers or baby formula. A lot of the time (like in the chocolate’s case) it was supposedly “apprehended” before it got to a Hamas member… but the irony of calling anyone terrorists and not including Netanyahu and the entire Israeli cabinet, let alone the maniacal no-God-fearing US politicians that goad on the Israelis… and all the colonizers across time… these filthy men all war criminals … they just get to eat chocolate? No embargo on them? This is the definition of collective punishment by the way, and Gaza has been under this blockade since 2007… so yeah, I mean, no shit Sherlock, giving two million starving people 35,000 meals… what kind of message do you think that sends the world, let alone the dying Gazans? There’s no confusion that they want to murder all the Palestinians, they’re just finding more and more sick ways to do this.
“This past weekend, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, visited the Egyptian side of the Gaza border and saw “long lines of blocked relief trucks waiting to be let into Gaza”. Israel’s understaffed, convoluted procedures for inspecting aid trucks can take three weeks, with trucks often rejected for carrying a single innocuous item that Israel deems of military value, forcing them to start the process all over again.”
“A land delivery that Israel organized without UNWRA in February ended in disaster, with more than 100 killed and hundreds more wounded when Israeli troops opened fire at hungry people desperate for food, contributing to panic.”
Why do you open fire at hungry people other than to sadistically torture them?
I think of what this panic does to your body. How your heartbeat accelerates when you’re constantly in fear, how this affects the way you sweat, the way you think, the way you absorb the world around you. Even when you eat you think of blood. How can you think of survival if all you can think of is your blood laced in the flour, how your brain matter might mix in with the dirt, how the grass has been obliterated and all that’s left of it now is the only food you have to eat. How can we let this happen?
“Destroying Al Shifa means ripping the heart out of the health system," a WHO spokesperson has declared… which again, seems like the point.
Another part of the colonizer’s long drawn-out affair is destroying your ability to stand up on your own two feet. The US has done this for decades, as it did this famously in Laos, with Operation Barrel Roll, a covert U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy Task, where between 14 December 1964 and 29 March 1973, the operation resulted in 260 million bombs being dropped on Laos in the space of a few years.
NPR wrote last year, “An estimated 80 million — over 30% of those dropped — failed to detonate. Less than 1% of the dormant bombs have been cleared since the war ended in Laos. About 20,000 civilians were killed during the same period. Even as the numbers gradually decline, thousands continue to be killed, crippled and disfigured. Half the victims are children.”
Sounds familiar, right? I think of all the people Israel is intentionally injuring, and how, again, people will die long protracted deaths… all because they refuse to leave their ancestral homelands. It’s so absurd it makes me feel sick that we’re still here, almost seven months in. Before Gaza, Laos was the most heavily bombed country in the world. Why? Well to stop the forces of communism apparently, but really it was about destroying something so that there’s no chance for it ever fighting back. If you didn’t know, Laos was a neutral country that was never at war with the US - this was just what the US decided to do during the Vietnam War, it decided to obliterate Vietnam’s neighbor as well. This is how petty this country is, and this is how US foreign policy works. It doesn’t care about morality or fairness. It will just pretend it does. And it sure as hell doesn’t care about human rights as it obliterates yours. All the US cares about is its image - it’s all-day narcissism baby.
April is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month.
The irony, yes, but as I remember this, I remember my ancestors and the two generations back to back that survived genocide. I remember the genocide of all colonized people, of the current genocides happening in Congo and Sudan, which are just the continuations of Western-created genocides that were first ignited by European colonizers five hundred years ago. Everything is linked.
“Not only does the enemy make you ignorant… he makes you want to love ignorance and hate knowledge,” Kwame Ture once said. I guess the only way we confront all of this is if we remain steadfast in educating ourselves. We must listen to Palestinians, to the war-torn, to the indigenous elders of all lands to show us the way. We must listen to their sadness as well as their messages of hope.
I realize that Israel is being allowed to do what it is doing by white people. It’s the Amy Schumer logic of - well why can’t Israelis also be colonizers? The rest of the world did it too! What’s so bad about Israelis doing the same thing? And that’s really what we’re being faced with here, whiteness. The immorality of it, but also the denialism, the narcissism it evokes in you when you assume to have a good life means taking it, stealing it from others. Whiteness is so interlaced with thievery that I realize so much of the work of unlearning whiteness is the work of the opposite - of humility. Of remembering, maybe you don’t deserve it all - and that’s OK. Maybe you can be grateful for what you have? Imagine.
I don’t know what else I can tell you for you to be moved. I am heartbroken every day and increasingly angry with the world. People by and large are depressing. I am discouraged by how even in leftist spaces there lacks real leadership, or vision or camaraderie. People bring in their own personal shit into organizing spaces and it just gets messy. I’ve seen this so much over the years - all of our egos need to fucking chill and we really need to focus on the goal at hand.
It’s not just about revolution, it’s about what’s after that. What do we see for ourselves, in this future many of us long for? If we could make the world truly a better place, what would we individually do to make it so? I recently watched this video that said shaming people into caring is not the way, and even though I agree, shame has actually been a useful tool for me in my life. I think for a narcissist to be humbled, they actually need to feel shame, to feel embarrassed by their lies. This is what we mean when we talk about “doing the work” - sometimes others show you how to do the work, you just need to be humble enough to do it.
Echoing my friend and comrade Nicki Kattoura’s words again, “There’s nothing more to say and everything more to do.” It starts with ourselves. This work starts with us. So may we commit to actually doing it.
Liberation for all, Free Palestine,
April 4th, 2024
The fact that we're witnessing this genocide happen in real time and the fact that most of the world does not care is just soul-crushing. The fact that Israel and its supporters still manage to play the victim card while strategically trying to wipe out the Palestinian population is truly a masterclass in narcissism. Most days I wonder if a mass extinction of the human species would be a good thing, maybe the next evolution of species would be an improvement over us 🤷🏻♀️
I am so disgusted by my country. Making a SHOW of pretending to care - sending aid that never makes it or kills the intended recipients - all while continuing to send my tax money in the form of bombs etc to Israel to continue their genocide. It is classic narcissist behavior - you absolutely nailed it. I write my officials at least once a week. I donate. I attend protests. Nothing happens, nothing changes. It feels like the U.S. has backed itself into a corner where it can't do anything differently without having to take ownership of it's/our own sins and make actual reparations...which, let's be honest, is never going to happen during Capitalism. How can we really call Israel to task, when they're just copying what we ourselves have done so many times??? Leaves a lot of room for people to start pointing out hypocrisy and ask increasingly uncomfortable questions. White people have generated so much wealth through the endless extraction of resources from lands stolen from the Indigenous peoples that would have (and continue to try to) protect them. The sad truth is we've probably never done the right thing. Though we sure love patting ourselves on the back as if we had. Understanding more and more that it's actually in opposition to the true, core tenants of our systems to do what is clearly morally right in this case (and undoubtedly many others)...and that is untenable. Thank you for helping me see. Time for real change!