Opposing the Gaza holocaust doesn’t make you a good person. Failing to oppose the Gaza holocaust makes you a bad person.
It’s not something you do so you can feel good about yourself, it’s something you do so you can live with yourself. Because the alternative is unacceptable to anyone with even the most elementary building blocks of a conscience.
I sometimes see people describing opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza as “virtue signaling”, but there is nothing virtuous about opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Virtue” is defined as “behavior which demonstrates high moral standards.” That’s not what this is. Opposing an active genocide is just the bare minimum requirement for not being a shitty human being. It’s no more “virtuous” than pulling a drowning toddler out of your pool; it’s just what one does when one is not a complete psychopath.
Those who call it “virtue signaling”, or accuse anti-genocide demonstrators of participating in some kind of fashionable social media trend, are confessing something very revealing about who they are as individuals. They are admitting that they cannot imagine any reason why anyone might take a forceful stand against an ongoing genocide unless it brought them social clout. They are admitting that they are bad people.
Those of us who have dedicated our time to opposing the genocide in Gaza are not doing anything special, noble, or exemplary. We won’t look back on our action with pride, we’ll just have the ability to look back on our lives at this point in history without shame. When our grandchildren ask us what we did about the Gaza holocaust, we won’t feel the need to lie or hang our heads. That’s it.
The fact that those of us who are aggressively opposing this genocide make up such a small percentage of our society does not say wonderful things about us, it says terrible things about our society. How pervasively our hearts and minds have been poisoned by propaganda and the self-centeredness of capitalism. How warped and twisted our consciences have been made. How many of us have failed to mature as individuals during our time on this planet.
It says dark, dark things about our civilization that this nightmare has been allowed to continue. That our rulers are able to facilitate this relentless mass atrocity month after month while still remaining in power. That today children will be murdered in some of the most horrific ways imaginable with the assistance of the western power structure we live under, and yet so few will stand against this because it’s unpleasant to think about, or because we’d rather watch TV, or because we support one of the western political parties who have helped make this possible, or because we’re worried what publicly opposing Israel might mean for our career prospects or our social standing, or because we fear that the cognitive dissonance we’d experience by letting the reality of this thing truly hit home for us might crush us to death under its weight.
And all we can do is refuse to participate in that insanity. Not because we are righteous, but because we want to be able to sleep at night. Because we don’t want to become the kind of person who can remain peripherally aware that they are witnessing history’s first live-streamed genocide without doing everything they can to try and stop it. Because we want to be able to look back and know we did everything we could.
Before he self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy last year in protest of the Gaza holocaust, an active duty member of the US Air Force named Aaron Bushnell wrote the following on Facebook:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Bushnell wasn’t passing judgement on anyone in particular when he said this. He was just handing us a mirror. What we see when we look into that mirror is nobody’s fault but our own.
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