At the Edge: Gaza and the Soul's Revolt

When the children’s cry breaks the spell and pierces the veil.

The U.S.-Israel genocide is entering its darkest chapter yet. Israel’s “final solution” is now in plain sight, for all to see. It’s undeniable, except, of course, for those insanely asserting Israel’s victimhood even as it enacts the most grave crime possible. Israel has always made its intention clear, which is genocide. This truth is now breaking to the surface and is irrefutable.

From within the Israeli human rights sphere, the veil is now torn wide open. In its landmark report Our Genocide, B’Tselem names, in its seismic findings, what cannot be unnamed. This is a genocide. There can be no more plausible deniability. To be clear, B’Tselem is widely regarded as one of the most credible and courageous human rights organizations in Israel. Internationally, B’Tselem is highly respected by human rights defenders, UN bodies, NGOs, and academic institutions, and is frequently cited in International reports, media, and legal proceedings.

B’Tselem’s report is a stunning bell of truth, constituting a moment of profound rupture in the narratives of denial. In tandem, the merciless starvation of Gaza with its evil GHF death squads has catalyzed a global tipping point while revealing the absolute moral bankruptcy, extreme violence, and sadism of Zionism.

No real humanitarian aid will be allowed into Gaza under Israel’s craven control of Palestinian life. Their “managed” aid is a charade. They intend to continue their forced starvation. They engineer scenes of chaos around the few trucks they allow in while armed trucks drop food at vendors who ply a trade no one can afford. They delight in ever more ghastly ways to torture, divide, and dehumanize. At the same time, Israeli television pundits joke about “fat mothers eating their children,” refusing to see what is directly in front of them.

Gaza has always been about everything but, most essentially, the soul of the world. It sits at the crossroads of empire, faith, resistance, trauma, and survival. It is a crucible where the machinery of colonialism, racial supremacy, and global complicity is laid bare. And now, it has become a mirror. A reckoning, a test for humanity, begging the question, what kind of world are we creating? To stand with Gaza isn’t just a political act; it is a spiritual call for justice, and a commitment to a more equitable and free world for all.

Israel and the US’s final blow of forced starvation has now entirely removed the veil. The unbearable silence and cries of starving children and the horrific scenes of those courageously defying death for a handful of flour have ricocheted into the heart of the world. This cruel abomination, a war against life itself, calls the world to shout out in a unified voice that pierces deeper, forcing this whole architecture of falseness to collapse.

Suddenly, the stark images of starved children flooding airwaves have sent those defending, or worse, enabling this abomination, scrambling to shape shift into advocates for Gaza. Are they for real? Has their deeper moral conscience finally pricked them awake? Or are they empty power suits, empty mouths, moving to the tune of “save my political ass and tattered reputation?” Are they doing this, as Alon Mizrahi suggests, trying to save Israel from itself (caring not a dot for Palestinians)?

From wherever this newfound conscience arises, common consensus is we need everyone to speak out. My footnote is just to make it sincere, not performative, because now, nothing is hidden. Everything is seen. In every nook and cranny, keep the pressure on by speaking truths. Let’s accelerate this turning tide into a tsunami, an avalanche, an undeniable truth force.

At this point, it’s clear the walls of the empire are fast eroding. Walls, kept up by violence and mendacity, forged within an entrenched apartheid mindset ever cementing two worlds apart. Beneath its familiar contours, our curriculum is to unpack its myths and mountains of lies completely. To go deeper into the dynamics between colonizer and colonized. White/whiter than and everyone else. Ruling classes/gate-holders, and everyone else. Patriarchy’s plantations of ownership, and everyone/everything else. And now, revealed for all to see, Zionism and everyone else.

What happens when both sides of the divide are alive within us? Within me? What are the shapeshifting “selves” I fluidly and clumsily pretzel myself into? And, for god’s sake, why? For a long time, I’ve inched along a complex process of breaking set with invisible taboos of what can and can’t be named. Tracking what it costs emotionally, in friendships, loyalties, and reputation in this dance of truths and less than truths. In the worlds that matter to me, and even ones that don’t, where still, my conditioned reflexes throw in a few prostitute nods and words. What is this deep need to “fit in,” honed with ease and accomplishment, while hiding from myself the backlashing sting of self-betrayal.

Where do I collude, stay quiet, deflect, justify, unconsciously shape-shift to “accord.” How does all this energetically activate the epigenetic strands of contrary ethnicities, allegiances, and conditioned fears that police my “acceptability.” How deep does the fear reach into ancestral remembering, navigating landscapes of survival from mother’s English milk, laced with the long betrayals of footless women staying quiet, keeping safe. Of staying invisible to avoid father’s fierce fist and lashing words forged from the bog, shite Dublin tenement travesty of Ireland's hunger, poverty, and enslavement by “Britishness.”

This endless, complex, nuanced dance. The moves between the immense, dominant world of modernity, built and maintained by multiple, silenced acts of violence. And then, the worlds that get lost, hidden, and unspoken in this march of empire. All that lies beneath. An endless story of an endless unfinished war filled with an infinite travesty of bodies, souls, hearts, and dreams shattered and scattered across multiple battlefields. This exhausting, ceaseless struggle of gaslit, deceptive words swirling through newsrooms that finally, finally, can no longer withstand the sheer immensity of Gaza.

What in god’s name, in the face of this mass starvation, ricocheting from Gaza through the invisible worlds of Sudan, Congo, and how many more myriad terrains of abandonment, is this quietness defending? I am often told that I am courageous, but I am not. I am a marker of the least of where we should be in naming the travesties of this long-carved-out empire. By no means am I a marker of where we need to leap to. Those who leap often don’t survive the wrath that gets unleashed. Instead, we honour them, not by emulating them, but by hoping their vast spirit will still save us. It won’t, not really. Now, the very earth summons us to do right by them. Calling us to rise through expressing our authentic truths, our leaps of courage.

Yet, even after knowing all this, I confess I am still someone haunted by numerous paper-cuts delivered by the currency of compromises needed to navigate the shadow castles of real and imagined power. Again and again, I ask my various selves why I sometimes defend the dysfunctional allegiances that inhabit my inner landscapes? Asking, are they really worth defending? The holy cows of silent “good practitioner” Buddhism that sacrifices the freedom to say otherwise? Like this, it goes on, this tired game of asking myself, why? The ways this inner policing quietens the scream still tethered to a long-ago arrow let loose, ever trying to find its clear mark, to sound its even truer voice.

And still, Gaza burns. Still, the children starve. Still, the world teeters. And still, those wielding the blunt instruments of hate and greed throw our world into an abyss. Still, they toss all that is good onto their sacrificial altar of madness. Still, they practice their dark art of crushing truth. And still, they aim to enthrone their gods of power for all time.

I, and we, are late. Late to do what must be done. Yet, the benevolent earth remembers us. The bones beneath are restless, the ancestors stir, and a new song is rising in rebellion. I feel it. Perhaps you do, too. And, contrary to my well-honed conditioning (please, sorry, thank you), I’m grateful for the outrage I feel. I am, and hopefully you are too, deeply offended and enraged by the hollow “power” suits clucking their fetid, false wares atop a mountain of torn, bloodied, and starved flesh.

They, the power suits, are trying to make us all accomplices in their industrial-scale, cold, calculated crimes against humanity. The once weighty term, “Crimes against humanity,” should trigger real indictments, not of those protesting genocide, but of those enabling it. Instead of a call to accountability, it has become a flattened, lifeless phrase. Killed by the architects of genocide, cruel agents of death, and the malignant high priests of ruin.

As the starvation deepens, they say, “We will call for a two-state solution.” All well and good, but did you ask the people in Gaza, the Palestinians? What do they think? Who are you? Who are we, sitting comfortably with full bellies, deciding the fate of those whose land this actually is? Palestine has always existed.

So many empty words and gestures thrown into thin air, while even now, after it all, the hollow ones STILL help turn the wheels of genocide. Behind closed doors, they connive to steal more land, to extract the $4.5 billion gas reserves off Gaza’s shores, and to build their fantasy “Middle East Riviera.” They are normalizing mass death and concentration camps while gutting international law. This is their deranged and catastrophic agenda–unless we stop them.

Gaza is about everything. It is also the precursor of mass death waiting on the near horizon for climate collapse. Scientists warn that at 2°C warming, 1 billion lives will be lost. At 3°C, the risk reaches 4 billion. We are now, they say, tracking toward 8°C. This means total extinction.

Those pushing the world into fascism are in lockstep with the fossil fuel industry’s colossal mendacity. They don’t want solutions. Instead, they criminalize dissent, gut environmental protections, and are normalizing this hellish march toward our mutual annihilation. We must refuse this death culture by all means possible, which, for non-violent activists, means, at the least, raising our voices.

Don’t forget, we are the majority. We are aligned with a rising counter-force, as if from the earth itself. An ungovernable, wild power trying to break the spell cast by this fetid old world order with its last stinking gasps. All who fight for these last threads of power have absolutely no vision of a viable future. None at all. Like Israel, it has become a mad beast lashing out. It has no real plan other than “keep killing, keep bombing, keep denying.”

This is empire, kept afloat by a mountain of soulless suits hanging on its teat of lies. They all know what’s coming, but fail to act to save anything except themselves. They hoard, extract, and retreat into fortified fantasies like the mad kings of old, thinking they will control the destiny of planetary life. Instead, if the story of old holds true, they will, one way of another, self suicide in their airless bunkers.

There is another force. A force within us all, the force of nature itself breaking free of this wretched spell cast by the cabal of the insane, drunk on power, sadism, and dreams of immortality. This, and the obscene cruelty inflicted on Gaza, this violence of late-stage colonial capitalism, with its ICE Gestapo and all else, calls us not only to find our authentic voice but to wield it forcefully. Voices from all corners are now needed to keep tearing away this fog of fear with its endless spin of sanctioned lies.

The earth, the ancient ones, and the generations to come all call us to end our collusion with mass annihilation. To break this craven hex of empire. To walk forward with defiant tenderness into the heart of this unraveling world.

We carry songs, plant, herb, and heart medicine. We hold practices of return. We are the story-keepers of life, courage, and overcoming. We carry fierce love, rising in sacred, embodied refusal. Entering the fire, we will not be consumed, but reforged through reclaiming the higher dream of a world seeded long before conquest.

We are the ones who still remember a wildness living in the rhizome’s dreaming roots. We are the ones who still hear a different drumbeat. And through our collective remembering, we will be the ones to emerge victorious. Believe it.

And, in these times, as empire falls, we will call in everyone, even those still turning the wheels of destruction. Because in the end, we all belong to this sacred web of life. Where else, if not here, is there to go?