For almost two years we have returned to the same spot with our flags, scarves and banners to vent our opposition to the genocide that is playing out in front of our eyes. But that little we are doing is part of a lot being done when we consider our vigil as a thread in a much bigger rope that is squeezing ever more tightly around the neck of the Israeli murder machine.
If it was not for all the pressure bubbling up from below, kept simmering by ordinary people, our governments in the West would be doing even less than they are at the moment. Those governments are inextricably locked into a Western economic and political power grid which leaves them feeling that they and the societies they govern are net beneficiaries of a Western hegemony which has robbed the world blind. But as they say, when you rob Peter to pay Paul, you are guaranteed the support of Paul.
We who gather in West Street have no affinity with the Pauls of this world. We identify with the Peters: the robbed, not the robbers. Ours is what the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel terms 'the eternal struggle of the ethical gaze.' If we can do nothing else we will continue to gaze and refuse to turn away.
About fifteen minutes ago, just as I was about to start writing, my wife showed me a photo. She told me that 11 years ago today the photo was taken as she and I stood alone on the footbridge across the Boyne protesting yet another Israeli war on Gaza. Soon after that Sinn Fein began organising weekly vigils outside the Tholsel, just up the street from our current weekly venue. I attended each. Then, as now, the purpose was to express solidarity and raise awareness. What we all do might be incremental but it is never pointless. We have, of course, the option of giving up. But if we do, we know that for Palestinians in Gaza there is no luxury of an option. If we fail to turn up we risk extinguishing the flickering light in the eyes of a starving Palestinian child.
Minutes before my wife showed me the photo, a friend rang and told me he had come across a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. He despises Nazis but is an avid book collector. He asked me if would like it. I declined, telling him that I didn't need to read the fiend's obnoxious work as I was watching it play out in front of my eyes on a daily basis.
Starving a civilian population to death is a quintessential Nazi strategy which the Israeli state is pursuing with determined savagery against the citizens of Gaza. The Nazi siege of Leningrad is a comparable point of reference when looking at the hell that is Gaza. The images emerging of the emaciated famished resemble those taken by the Red Army when it entered the Nazi death camps. Watching the rather rotund and well fed David Mencer, spokesman for the office of the war criminal and chief genocidaire, Benjamin Netanyahu, squirm and scream as he tries to parry and thwart questions from the BBC's Nic Robinson, it is impossible to evict from the mind images of another well fed apologist for mass murder, Hermann Göring.
Scott Lea of the The International Rescue Committee said of the children being starved by Mencer and his ilk: “Their small bodies are shutting down. They can’t breathe; their immune systems are collapsing"". All of this while people like Mencer project chutzpah which has been defined as a person who kills both parents then demands sympathy on the grounds that he is an orphan. Sort of sums up where the Israelis are at.
We who gather in West Street have no affinity with the Pauls of this world. We identify with the Peters: the robbed, not the robbers. Ours is what the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel terms 'the eternal struggle of the ethical gaze.' If we can do nothing else we will continue to gaze and refuse to turn away.
About fifteen minutes ago, just as I was about to start writing, my wife showed me a photo. She told me that 11 years ago today the photo was taken as she and I stood alone on the footbridge across the Boyne protesting yet another Israeli war on Gaza. Soon after that Sinn Fein began organising weekly vigils outside the Tholsel, just up the street from our current weekly venue. I attended each. Then, as now, the purpose was to express solidarity and raise awareness. What we all do might be incremental but it is never pointless. We have, of course, the option of giving up. But if we do, we know that for Palestinians in Gaza there is no luxury of an option. If we fail to turn up we risk extinguishing the flickering light in the eyes of a starving Palestinian child.
Minutes before my wife showed me the photo, a friend rang and told me he had come across a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. He despises Nazis but is an avid book collector. He asked me if would like it. I declined, telling him that I didn't need to read the fiend's obnoxious work as I was watching it play out in front of my eyes on a daily basis.
Starving a civilian population to death is a quintessential Nazi strategy which the Israeli state is pursuing with determined savagery against the citizens of Gaza. The Nazi siege of Leningrad is a comparable point of reference when looking at the hell that is Gaza. The images emerging of the emaciated famished resemble those taken by the Red Army when it entered the Nazi death camps. Watching the rather rotund and well fed David Mencer, spokesman for the office of the war criminal and chief genocidaire, Benjamin Netanyahu, squirm and scream as he tries to parry and thwart questions from the BBC's Nic Robinson, it is impossible to evict from the mind images of another well fed apologist for mass murder, Hermann Göring.
Scott Lea of the The International Rescue Committee said of the children being starved by Mencer and his ilk: “Their small bodies are shutting down. They can’t breathe; their immune systems are collapsing"". All of this while people like Mencer project chutzpah which has been defined as a person who kills both parents then demands sympathy on the grounds that he is an orphan. Sort of sums up where the Israelis are at.
Despite the wails of antisemitism, there should be no recoiling from describing what is taking place in Gaza today as Nazi-like. Francesca Albanese, the indefatigable United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, has boldly stated:
My generation was taught Nazism was the greatest evil; and it was; Today, a state (Israel) starving millions/shooting children for sport, shielded by democracies & dictators alike, is the new abyss of cruelty.
At a time when so many monstrous men of god are either silent or backing the genocide, an exception, the Irish Presbyterian minister, Mark Gray in an outstanding piece of writing refers to a rare member of the IDF - one with a conscience - returning home after serving in Gaza, claiming that he felt like a Nazi mistreating Jews. If we fail to call Israeli policy by its Nazi name then the moral worth of the undertaking Never Again is devalued. It simply allows the never to happen again masked by language that is less than appropriate to describe the evil in front of us.
A passage from that same Mark Gray article brings home the true horror in graphic terms:
That is why we stand here today.
CTS graduate, Rev Dr Becca Young, has been teaching Palestinian children via Zoom in Gaza and the West Bank. She found an openly posted video of the Beit Hanoun school where she volunteered being obliterated. Israeli soldiers roared their approval. She wept. In cosmopolitan Israel, sweaty night-clubbers cavort to a song about burning Palestinian villages. In moon scape Gaza, Israeli warriors put on the underwear of Palestinian women, whose wrecked homes they ransack. A society unhinged, its moral compass smashed. A child hasn’t spoken or eaten in days. When a psychologist finally gets him to talk, he asks a question that stops her cold: ‘Everyone says my friend went to heaven, but I didn’t see his head. How can he go to heaven without his head?’ This is Gaza today.
That is why we stand here today.
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Good article.
ReplyDeleteStrong arguments in favour of the Nazi handle. They would kill us if it advanced their agenda. It's certainly the worst behaviour currently on the global stage and there's plenty of competition for that. Demonstrates the racism of the West. The colonial powers can't set aside their colonial mindset. I see Germany have learnt absolutely nothing. It's not guilt it's hypocrisy. If this was a power with an Islamic background carrying out this genocide no-one would sleep until it was sorted.
I heard it described today as a Western genocide. I think it an apt description.
DeleteCam Ogie comments
ReplyDeleteThis article speaks with the clarity and conviction of someone who refuses to let go of their conscience, even as the world turns away from a horror too inconvenient to confront. What you describe—the small, persistent act of showing up each week on West Street—is not just protest. It is part of a larger rope, a rope woven from thousands of acts of defiance, compassion, and truth-telling across the world. Each vigil, each banner, each voice refusing silence becomes a strand. On its own it may feel thin—but together, they are forming something strong enough to resist, to expose, to pull down the machinery of death.
This rope you speak of is not metaphorical only—it is a real force. It is squeezing, as you said, around the neck of the Israeli murder machine. It is tightening with every protest, every act of civil disobedience, every refusal to look away. It is the same rope being pulled by students occupying campuses, doctors refusing to stay silent, artists and writers defying censorship, and survivors of other genocides saying: we recognize this; we will not be complicit.
Meanwhile, Western governments, locked into their colonial calculus, continue to parrot the language of moral leadership while enabling ethnic cleansing. They gather each year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, mouthing “Never Again,” while watching in real-time as another people is starved, bombed, and erased. What is remembrance worth if it does not shape our response to present-day atrocity? If “Never Again” excludes Gaza, then it was never about justice—it was about power.
That is why your rope matters. That is why each strand matters. Because in the absence of political courage, the world is held together only by the moral will of ordinary people. Pedro Lemebel’s “eternal struggle of the ethical gaze” lives in these acts: not grand speeches, but the simple refusal to look away, the stubborn insistence that Palestinian life is sacred, and that every child’s name matters.
To compare Israel’s actions in Gaza to Nazi crimes is not hyperbole—it is the moral comparison required of anyone who truly meant “Never Again.” Starvation, the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, the psychological annihilation of children, the dehumanization of an entire people: these are not unfortunate byproducts. They are deliberate tools. They are ideological.
And the most chilling part is how normal it is being made to seem. The laughter of nightclubbers to genocidal songs. The mocking videos from soldiers. The grotesque pride in cruelty. It evokes not just historical trauma, but moral collapse.
So people continue to stand. And in doing so, they add another thread to that rope—one that may seem fragile, but in its collective strength, is becoming unbreakable.
The child who wonders if his friend can reach heaven without his head— he is the reason . The flickering light in the eyes of a starving Palestinian child— that is the signal. If we give up, that light goes out. But if we hold the rope, pull tighter, and refuse to let go, we help keep that light burning until justice comes.
And it will come. Because we are many, and we are holding the rope: - A rope that ties together the hands of the oppressor, even as it binds the hearts of the oppressed with hope.