I had just returned from my honeymoon to my quiet beach canyon home in California. Our small house is tucked away under a dense thicket of overgrown wisteria and looming shrouds of oak trees, two mourning doves taking turns watching over their nest as the other fetches more grasses and twigs and food. I opened my phone, eyes widened, and scrolled through the litany of reality horror films on all the major news sites and social media, aghast along with everyone else that people could be so brutal to each other. Stories of Hamas fighters mowing down old ladies waiting at the bus stop, dispersing into quiet neighborhoods and executing entire families as they were just waking up, gassing people out of their safe rooms and gunning them down, terrorizing a music festival with indiscriminate death and chaos. It didn’t seem real. It was all too horrific.
I’ve always wondered about how mass shooters here in the US actually carry their plans all the way through, and why none of them are snapped out of it after the first kill. It is one thing to plan a mass killing meticulously for weeks or months, and to hate a group of faceless people as a collective, before they are real, before you realize suddenly that they are grandmothers and daughters, and your buried humanity crawls to the surface again. Maybe I’m being totally presumptuous, but it seems like a whole other reality to be there in the flesh, with a gun pointed at a person’s face, and see them as suddenly real, as innocent and trembling and not the people you should be lashing out at. Why do mass murderers, why do Hamas fighters, not suddenly think, this is fucking crazy, what am I doing? James Holmes, the gunman at the Aurora, Colorado cinema shooting, said in his police interview that he didn’t want to kill people up close because it would have become too real and personal. He wanted to keep his distance, or shoot people in the back of the head so he didn’t have to see their faces. Maybe they’re too jacked on adrenaline, and in a trance of indiscriminate death to stop. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Or how does anyone get hard by raping a screaming woman? People will just say, oh it’s because of power, but that’s not a real answer. And how do you just say, Oh, well Israel kills children too, so what’s the matter. Free Palestine! Being there in person, it has to make death and war profoundly worse. Israel avoids most this reality by bombing Gaza. They still kill their women and children with indiscriminate slaughter, but they press a button, and suddenly hundreds of children are buried under rubble.
It would be one thing if Hamas only fired rockets over as they have sometimes in the past, usually never hitting anything, but occasionally killing people at random. If that were the case, we would be talking more just about the numbers, human beings as statistics, varying scoreboards of death, the proportions and comparisons of people killed. But this world where all humanity has been sucked into a blackhole, watching videos of Hamas fighters killing people up close somehow makes it exponentially more horrific.
In the past, you’ve repeated all the same bits about how the people of Gaza live in an open air prison, how they have been under constant attack. Two-and-a-half million people crammed together in impossibly unlivable and miserable conditions, what would you expect other than some resistance from time to time. But not like this. This has already proved to be unimaginably worse for everyone. Why does the death drive in some people overpower the innocence of everyone else, wrapping people from all over the world into your evil? In one sense, it seems like it should be some other law of Newtonian physics, that a reaction like this is inevitable. If you corral this many people into such a claustrophobic arena of hell, where the average age is eighteen, where ninety percent of the water is contaminated, where Israel continues to fill water wells with concrete, where a single hospital in Gaza receives thirty-six suicide attempts a month, a place where no one is allowed to leave except for the very few exceptional cases, then you can’t expect it to just hum along normally forever. What did Israel think was going to happen? You can’t just build a wall around them and expect it to work. No wall has ever worked in history.
But then at the same time, you can understand Israel’s broadly painted logic that if these people keep bombing your discos and your buses, it’s better to shove them all into a crumbling paddock and build a fortress around them. I don’t know. I’m not qualified in any capacity too opine much on this conflict. I’m an atheist from California who has never even visited this part of the world. I don’t like the vaguely masked catharsis that writing about it provides—you say your bit and then you move onto the next thing. There is something truly hideous in that. But it seems like a larger moment that has already spiraled, one that the US has already gleefully gotten more involved in than it already was.
The morning of waking up to the news of the attack, I walked down to my studio and watched the orioles and scrubs jays and warblers take turns bathing in the bird bath, and I just sat there for a while in silence, heartbroken, scared for the people kidnapped, scared for the scale of death that would soon come indiscriminately and unmercifully, scared for the Palestinian children who did nothing but get born in an unlucky place at an unlucky time, for all the Palestinian men and women who were equally unlucky. I thought about our own place here, in this quiet canyon where the old hippies and rednecks give way to the yuppies now buying up all the properties, probably one of the safest places in California besides its obvious risk of fires, in a country that has not had war on its soil in my lifetime, where a country’s collective psyche has completely eliminated all fear of war raining down from the sky upon it. The US still suffers from its own originating insanity, trying with all its might to remain true to its origins of a horrific hillbilly Wild West. We have our mass shootings that don’t even have an agenda, our killers don’t believe in anything. We have these peripheral horrors, a pointless nihilism in our terror, but we don’t have war. We don’t have the fear of militants invading our homes the way Hamas did. And we don’t live in the inescapable misery of living in Gaza and being continuously bombed by Israel. It’s largely because of our own geographical luck that this country is able to take its hunger for war elsewhere, away from the local pedestrian violence of the city. Our experience of war consists entirely of reading about it, seeing a Michael Bay movie. And more and more of the action is done in planes, or drones, remote-controlled warfare where even our soldiers don’t get the dust of war on them.
I remember immediately after graduating college nearly fifteen years ago, and beginning a few years of a rambling sojourn of environmentalism, committed to protests and permaculture and something they called nonviolent communication, an earnest but sometimes pathetic time in my life. My girlfriend at the time told me delightfully that a friend from college who enlisted to serve in the war in Afghanistan was doing a lot of good because he told her stories of how he would drink tea with the villagers of whatever remote mountain village they were passing through. I’m sure he truly believed he was there for good, maybe he really thought he was liberating the people from the Taliban, maybe thought this experience of drinking tea was exotic enough to tell people about. But it seemed so appallingly obvious, so incredibly fucking stupid to not put yourself in their shoes, and think if the roles were reversed and you lived in some mountain village and war-hungry Muslims with monstrous military weaponry invaded your country, how you would feel. How could you not ask yourself, what are we doing here as a whole? Sure, drink their tea and tell yourself this is a movie moment, convince yourself that these people like you, but then get out of their country and stop being a pawn for the war machine. September 11th altered our psyche forever, but if smaller versions of that were being consistently felt around the country, we would be a different people entirely.
I hate to admit this, but seeing the footage of Hamas’ surprise coordinated attack into Israel, from land and sea and sky, somehow made it more real than it was before. It looked like a nightmare come to life, the footage from the music festival as the Hamas’ motorized paragliders descended upon it from the sky. You couldn’t totally make out what the dots in the sky were at first, but the camera periodically goes back to them, as the music and the dancing continue. It looks like any other festival you’ve been to, and you can imagine what it was like, doing mushrooms and raving into the wee morning hours of the next day, sweating gleefully in the rose-tinted dawn with your friends and strangers who become your momentary best friends for that time. Being on mushrooms at a rave, three miles from your sworn enemies does seem like the worst idea anyone could come up with.
I have a Jewish Marxist anti-Zionist friend who was immediately convinced it was a false flag operation, that Hamas wouldn’t be this reckless with their own fate, because obviously what comes next is total annihilation of Gaza as it exists today. Obviously Netanyahu is hungry for blood, and this is a perfect excuse to fulfill that for him. My friend referred to how terrible the optics are and a resistance force wouldn’t be so stupid because snatching young women onto your motorcycle, desperately pleading for their lives, looks very very bad for any Palestinian cause as a generic whole. If you watch these videos, surely you couldn’t just repeat your same old lines about freeing Palestine, or about how this is what resistance looks like. Surely this is a time for some sensitivity. He said that at the very least, the Israeli government knew about the ensuing attacks and allowed it to happen, in the same way the US government knew about the 9/11 attacks and allow those to happen, because it gave us every excuse to go into Iraq and Afghanistan in order to siphon all the resources we’ve salivated over, to feed the swelling budgets for the military industrial complex. And think that’s idiotic, and Israel didn’t need to manufacture an excuse anymore than the Bush administration needed an excuse to wage war.
But there is something to be said for the major US media outlets being an extension of Israeli state propaganda, repeating in headline after headline that this is Israel’s 9/11. Because we may be a dense people, and we need to be spoken to like children who can only remember a few landmarks of history, but we are worse than children. Children are curious, humble, open-minded for a while until they graduate into the frontiers of stupidity and density with the rest of us; we are paranoid cave dwellers who puff our chests out when posturing as informed adults. We are cretin turd people who get our news from headlines and Instagram stories, who lash out at the world in binary feuds of which of the two positions is the correct one. Dueling protests in every major American city has a pro Israel faction on one side of the street, waving their flags, screaming like football fans, and across the street is the pro Palestine tribe, the triumphant affectionate allied victims. Everyone already forgot about the devastating earthquakes in Morocco, or the fires in Maui, or the looming war between Serbia and Kosovo, or even the war in Ukraine. We may be dense, but by the looks of it, this is going to be their 9/11, not only because one of the most advanced militaries and intelligence agencies was completely caught off guard, and the scale of death was unprecedented, and the visual horror of both events are unbelievably graphic, but it’s their 9/11 largely because 9/11 was the catalyst for the grotesquerie of militarism to take complete hold of our lives, where all dissent was squashed for awhile, where you were mocked and ridiculed and scorned and threatened with violence if you even mentioned that our revenge should be tempered. Remember immediately following September 11th, 2001, when California Congressmember Barbara Lee was the only member to vote against the war. Because the vote was held three days after the attacks, and granted the president expansive powers to use whatever military force he needed. According to Lee, “All it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11.” A blank check for our forever wars, for feeding the vampire god with all the lustrous grandeur for death it can consume. And she received countless death threats as a result of her dissenting vote. Just the other day, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called any calls for a ceasefire by progressive Congressmembers “disgraceful” and “repugnant.” Just today, as of this writing, Israel just bombed the Gaza City hospital, killing at least 500, probably most of whom were women and children. But our government says that even mentioning that all that should come to a pause, is disgusting. It’s Israel’s 9/11 because the power grabs and salivating revenge that have followed are proving to be more horrific and complete than we thought, there will be no criticism or opposition for a while from regular liberal press, like there was no opposition to America’s so-called War on Terror for a while. People on social media are criticizing the war, but we don’t matter, we are in an audience cauldron who’s only repose is to congratulate ourselves and yell at others. Real dissent is unacceptable.
Remember when Michael Moore was booed off stage during his Oscar acceptance speech for making his whole speech about Bush “sending us to war for fictitious reasons.” The New Yorker and The New York Times supported the war without reservation. Remember when the Michael Bay movie, The Rock, was used as inspiration for false WMD intelligence, and those dangling green balls of gas that looked like humongous green anal beads were used to cement people’s paranoia that we were all going to be under attack in some cinematic face-melting catastrophe. Remember when Chris Hedges was booed off the stage during his commencement speech at Rockford College where he spent the time criticizing the continued war efforts in Iraq, and subsequently felt forced to resign from The New York Times. All this is to say that just because everyone now agrees the Iraq War was a truly evil and insane and demonic kind of American horror, and the whole Bush administration were something akin to real-life vampire villains who get their nut off by killing innocent desert children, or that Erik Prince and his whole Blackwater mercenary army of extracurricular murder were bad people, American liberals have this sense that they always held these beliefs of being against the war, that they simply and quietly and privately switched their positions when the public tides shifted and now they can all bark the same crying bullshit at every dinner party. But they didn’t. We were cowards all along, just going along with everyone else, agreeing with what we’re told, lapping up that self-aggrandizing bullshit just to kill the time. We’ll read the room, the way politicians read the room, and then base their point of view based on that.
In the recent days since Israel’s slaughter-bombing that has no end in sight, since turning off all power and electricity to Gaza, there are fragments of dissent, positions in the mainstream press that maybe Netanyahu’s government is committing unspeakable war crimes on children. But for the most part, the narrative is that Israel is defending itself, and it has every right to defend itself. The mainstream liberal press of supporting Israel in whatever vengeful horror it rains down on the regular civilians of Gaza is in haste, and our worst instinct of correcting Hamas’s evils by any means necessary is not going to age well, because already, just a few days into their revenge, the scale of death and misery is unimaginable. As of this writing, over three thousand people in Gaza have been killed, 400,000 have been left homeless, over a million have been ordered to leave Gaza. Stalin’s ridiculous quote about one death being a tragedy and a million deaths being a statistic or whatever is as repulsive as it is wrong. These are real people being burned and pulverized into the ashen powder of memory.
The United States is supplying Israel with advanced military weaponry. It sent its largest aircraft carrier over there to help slaughter captive Gazans once and for all, to turn it into a parking lot for a bigger rave one day. The US already gives Israel the equivalent of around ten million dollars a day, and the number is surely to go up dramatically.
We have to do something, or say something, or post something. We have to toss our loosely articulated stance into the arena, into the heap with everyone else, reposting a post that someone you follow reposted, and if it looks important enough that you think everyone who follows you needs to see it so they will repost it to their people and then eventually something will happen, some seismic shift will take place, and maybe Biden will stop sending warships and eventually come up with a peace deal. Or at the very least everyone will know that you care. Because you do care. We all care to some varying degrees, because it’s devastating, and your world is comfortable and idyllic in comparison, and it feels wrong to watch so many people—so many kids—suffer in the most tragic ways imaginable. Palestine is a country of children, and the sky is raining down phosphorous onto them, sticking to their skin and burning them alive, sizzling through their flesh like dissolving in acid, and you are scrolling, or writing a blogpost, trying to find the right thing to say. I am by no means giving ridicule. We’ve been disenfranchised. We are forced to be spectators. It’s not like we feel empowered when we vote, it’s not as if we leave the voting booth every four years, invigorated, totally floored that we just made a difference and did our civic duty, and somehow made the world a better place. But at least we get to watch, at least we get to doom scroll and reinforce the algorithm that will further reinforce our biases.
The continued bombing of Gaza is pointless bloodlust, with no satiating end, its psychopathic greed for more dead bodies has no conclusion except breeding another generation of revenge. Condemn the killing of others with every fiber of your being. Demand ceasefires from the beginning, not months or years from now, because every child that is killed, every family killed—Israeli or Palestinian—dramatically distances every future attempt of peace, any attempt of their own success. The US’s drone warfare program created far more enemies than combatants it killed, and Israel’s scale of retaliation is doing the same. There’s no correct position to any of this than the side of life, of not killing people on the other side of a wall because they happened to be born there.