Newfound clarity in the fog of an alleged war

The conflict that wasn’t

How is it possible to to live through possibly the greatest moral obscenity of ones time, and not be fully aware of its most basic attendant circumstances? Given the abundance of information available to most people, it’s an almost absurd position to be in. And yet there I was just a short while ago.

Growing up, and living through a substantial part of the apartheid system in South Africa, I should have developed a sense of awareness of, and familiarity with its oppressive, degrading and dehumanizing characteristics. One would think that I would recognize it, if I sensed it was being applied elsewhere. And yet I didn’t see it happening in Palestine, even though many knowledgeable folks regard the Israeli version as significantly worse than that experienced in South Africa. For me, the situation in the Middle East was an acrimonious relationship between Jews and Muslims – in short, a conflict. And for the most part, I believed that it was a religious conflict, so being atheist, it repulsed me… to my great shame.

And it wasn’t like the popular mass media had up to that point, made any great effort to expose the unfolding systematic repression and dispossession of the Palestinian people, which I now know fully as Colonial Settler Occupation. No, the media was largely complicit in covering up the atrocity, and still does.

That was the extent of my ignorance – until the events of October 7th, and the days that followed brought a kind of clarity that I had never experienced before.

Indisputably, October 7th was a violent, abhorrent attack on civilians by Hamas and is rightfully condemned by all decent human beings. And yet we are left to comprehend the scale, brutality and utter inhumanity of the response by Israel and the IDF1.

Having watched the events unfolding since that dreadful day, mostly live and in real time on various ME news networks, some of whom have actual citizen journalists2 inside the Gaza strip, I believe I now understand to a significant degree, the situation in the Middle East. I know with a fair degree of certainty that it is not a conflict, not even a religious one, nor a war. The absurdly disproportionate Israeli military response, and the almost primitive strength of Palestinian combative power, cannot possibly make this a war; not by any stretch of the imagination.

THIS abomination is the systematic dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian peoples. It is in fact, now developing into a genocide3, if it is not that already.