Yasmine

Not enough

The Last Chapter of the Genocide This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly tu...

www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/26/t...

My head and heart are with everybody who realises what a global shift this is going to be, but how it also marks another milestone in the swing towards futures that we dread.

From Lendall Thomas, via Nishant Shah, via Alexis Danzig

My heart is with the people who are going to be severely and disproportionately impacted by the new mandate of the US elections. My head is with the people who I trust and know will make the changes to ensure the protections of those who will be most affected.

Within and outside, for others who share your experience and your grief. We will hold you while you figure out the next steps, but you are not alone.

4. You are not alone. This is not unique. It is not exceptional. Your narrative of what your country or people believe in and stand for, might have been challenged but this has happened before. To many others. Reach out.

If you always felt that you were attacked by the system, know that people before you have lived through this, thrived, and found other ways of finding care. If all of us took the time to process our emotions towards caring for others, it will develop its own momentum.

3. If you feel that the system has failed you, remember that systems have always failed people. If you feel it is happening to you for the first time, it means that you have had privilege which is for the first time being threatened.

If you do not align with this majority, it doesn't mean that you have lost. It means that you have work to do, to make sure that you work together for things that are important for you and for them.

2. You have not lost. Elections might appear as competitions but we need to change that narrative. Elections are about seeing what a majority (however flawed that concept might be) believes is the right way of governing collectively.

It means that a rights-based, process-driven formal approach has been blocked but there are other avenues through which things you care about can be mobilized.

1. An election is only one of the ways by which care is organized and managed. If the electoral mandate goes against your own, it doesn't mean there's no way forward.

As somebody who has lived in, negotiated with, been persecuted by authoritarian governments, here are four things to set as a reminder against the onset of despair; remembering over and over again that despair is the privilege of those who can afford it.

That's the way

More and more trauma, suffering and loss every single day

Israeli father of a hostage, Yehuda Cohen, argues that Israel's payments to hostage families is actually a form of bribery meant to quiet their dissent.

He goes on to accuse Israel's government of genocide, as well as saying he will go to the ICC to support prosecutor Karim Khan.

“What are you talking about, killing everyone,” he then says in a low voice, looking at me through the rear mirror “What are we, Germans?”
February 2009

I felt a rising nausea, but before I deflated completely I told him, well, there are only two options, either we end the occupation and pull out of all the territories, or we kill everyone, otherwise it will never stop. We just need to eliminate them.

I finally realized that any logic would crash into the invisible wall of clichés and saw how all the arguments derived from logic shatter against it.

“Me I’m a leftist, you know,” he says, “honestly my heart aches for the children, but there’s no choice.” I could almost see his bleeding leftist heart.

“What are you talking about, killing everyone,” he then says in a low voice, looking at me through the rear mirror “What are we, Germans?”

February 2009

I felt a rising nausea, but before I deflated completely I told him, well, there are only two options, either we end the occupation and pull out of all the territories, or we kill everyone, otherwise it will never stop. We will just need to eliminate them.

I finally realized that any logic would crash into the invisible wall of clichés and saw how all the arguments derived from logic shatter against it. I felt a rising nausea, but before I deflated completely I told him, well, there are only two options,

Once again I asked him how will this help. Hamas, you know, they have faith in God, they have a very long breath, I told him, and kept proving to him why it would never work and he didn’t even have an answer. How come the children of a friend of mine in Gaza are to blame for Hamas's Rockets?

– a bunch of criminals and villains under a thick layer of makeup, morons with staggering salaries who want us to let them manage our lives with the talent they have demonstrated so far – it did not register.

Somewhere a warning bell rang, but between the talking and the baby attached to me in the carrier, and while all the election signs and billboards at the sides of the road still boasted all those ridiculous clowns

I knew I’d made a mistake but for some reason I didn’t stop. Like when you eat couscous and forget to stop before you’re full.

Ah, my driver with the ponytail around a bald skull, he and Benny Morris, a perfect match. Once again we didn’t finish the work. “We should have left only parking lots there. Take down everything. There should be no more houses there. Then later we will help them!”

I asked him how it helped us, a few months passed and once again rockets are falling [in Israel]. What’s the use?
“No,” he insists, “it’s because we didn’t do it properly!”

“Well they’re all pretty much the same,” I tell him. “Look, Barak and Livni are the ones who went to war in Gaza [in 2008], what’s the big difference. What would Bibi do that they didn’t?”
At which point the driver explains that really though, in Gaza there was no choice.