Preface: I’ve been wanting to use writing as a tool to work through my feelings about the genocide in Gaza for a while now. This piece has gone through countless iterations, and won’t be perfect, but I hope you read the full essay. Please keep in mind that it’s my personal opinion.

In the year 2000 I moved from Dublin to Hampshire to do an MA course in radio. It took just one trip to the pub to discover that the people there were not taught about Ireland in school. They didn’t seem to know basic facts; that we had a native language, our own currency, the difference between the North and the South of the island and the history behind that. Ireland by it’s very nature of being a country colonised by England is a significant part of English history, but it was and remains to be one of many blind spots in the English education system when it comes to imperialism. This isn’t new. It has been a much debated issue, especially concerning the teaching of the British transatlantic slave trade, but I reiterate it to state that when you come from a country that has been colonised, you live with an intrinsic awareness of the gap between the truth and what we are told, or in this case, not told. The coloniser always controls the narrative.

Never in my lifetime have I been so conscious of this disconnect between truth and propaganda as I have with Israel and Gaza in the last nineteen months. Genocide as content is really something. The bombing of the Palestinian people being streamed in 4k to us on a daily basis, each traumatised person’s singular experience of horror transmuted into assets and videos for us to consume at our leisure - is there something about the disembodiment of the horror onto our phone screens that makes it more unreal? In her excellent New Yorker article The Broken Brain, Jia Tolentino quoted Richard Seymour’s book The Twittering Machine:

‘ “this avoidance of time’s actual flow, this compulsion toward the chronophage, the time-eater, is a horror story that is likely to happen only “in a society that is busily producing horrors.” ‘

The disposability of news as content allows us to scroll past a video of a five year old girl running through a fire in a bombed school, or a traumatised surgeon begging for help, to bask instead in the cool dumbness of a viral dance or a funny cat video - but no matter how quick one’s fingers move to avoid them those pictures and videos of Gaza linger in the corners of our consciousness, impossible to un-see.

And for those who are able to face the horror head on, a cascading sense of despair and helplessness, replaced, once one is able to peel oneself off the floor, by a roiling compulsion to do something.

Speaking out on social media is terrifying. Whatever opinions you want to express on Israel and Gaza, putting your head above the parapet risks being screamed at, dismissed, patronised, taken out of context, told you’re too late and relentlessly trolled. There is safety in numbers in a public letter. In the last few weeks we have seen three high profile ones; from Amnesty International, a group of four hundred writers and the charity Choose Love. Alongside the sending of their letter to Keir Starmer, the Choose Love charity ambassadors stood outside parliament and read out the name of every identified Gazan child who has died since October 7th. The act of speaking the names of Gaza’s murdered children lasted from day into night and all the way through to morning. Eighteen hours in total.

I signed the two charity letters above but I can’t help thinking these letters won’t make the slightest bit of difference. Like Gia Tolentino describes writing letters to her Senator’s office about the situation in Gaza:

“A chill sets in at some point, then a grimness, then a detachment. I kept writing, but it felt like a ritualistic impulse, or like throwing coins into a fountain when I was a child.”

To me, the walls of Westminster are impenetrable to the compassion of ordinary people. My cynicism of Westminster is learned. The British government has long been complicit in genocides, over centuries. I wrote an article around the themes of togetherness and exceptionalism for the Substack letters event last Christmas in which I talked about the Irish famine.

At the heart of our history lessons in secondary school is the story of The Great Famine, a defining and horrific period of Irish history which happened in the mid nineteenth century when Ireland was ruled by England.

The main source of food in Ireland at the time was potatoes, and when there was a blight in the potato crop people began to starve. Half a million people were evicted from their houses, often illegally and violently. As more and more people died, the English government continued to export all other Irish crops out of the country, causing mass starvation. Altogether, over one million people died. A quarter of the population disappeared, either in death or in emigration.

This explains why Ireland as a country is generally deeply empathetic to the plight of Palestinian people. Because to Irish people, mass starvation is not an incomprehensible thing, less than two hundred years ago it happened and it was as a direct result of English exceptionalism.

Despite the knowledge of a genocide in my home country so close to my lifetime, I have always held the view that we are morally progressing as a species and that atrocities like the Holocaust and Irish famine can be safely consigned to historic record. But to watch the slaughter and dehumanization of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and to live in a country whose government is choosing complicity in such actions, is to experience a new awareness of history dragging itself forwards, flattening previous iterations of itself, forging new routes of destruction and corruption, through which we all must travel by the very fact of our existence in this place, in this time. It feels like being caught in a rip tide.

As of last month, over fifty four thousand Palestinians have been killed by the IDF. Since Benjamin Netanyahu announced the launch of Operation Gideon’s Chariots, saying Israel would ‘take control’ of the whole of Gaza, there has been a noticeable shift in the media reporting and the political rhetoric around Gaza. Ireland’s premier and deputy premier both accused Israel of genocide in the Irish parliament for the first time last week, but Keir Starmer’s threatened ‘concrete action’ has amounted to nothing. Every day more bombs fall and the death toll rises. Starmer called the situation ‘intolerable’ two weeks ago. What I find intolerable is Starmer’s failure to act.

Hanif Abdurraqib wrote an article called In Defense Of Despair for The New Yorker last week which floored me. In the article Abdurraqib talks through his feelings on how to live now, in a world in which a genocidal campaign has been live streamed for a year and a half and counting:

“The world at large is seemingly fine with what we are witnessing, and I think that suggests the irreversible unwellness of a people, of a society.”

Abdurraqib goes on to talk about the things he does to shape his relationship with despair into something proactive. I like this. It’s not hope, it’s constructive realism. He talks about having black elders in his life - not family, more friends, part of a community of equals. He goes to the nursing home, plays cards, gossips. He observes through them, despite their short time left, a deep felt compassion for the world they still live in:

“they worry about the world. They ache for it, they are displeased by what they see, and still they organise, in the small ways they can—by donating clothes, or by ordering a bus to take them to go and vote… my heart is broken and repaired by them, in equal measure”.

These black elders remind me of my Father in law, Douglas. Douglas is eighty years old and lives in Sheffield and has been marching, shouting and disrupting in the name of justice and freedom for the people of Palestine for over fifteen years. Douglas firmly believes in the BDS movement. The BDS stands for Boycott, Divest, Sanctions. Back in 2017 Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters on hearing that Thom Yorke was planning on playing a gig in Tel Aviv , wrote him a letter. In it, as a representative of the BDS movement, Roger explained his logic for asking Thom to reconsider his gig;

BDS is a global protest movement started in 2005 by Palestinian civil society, as a form of non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation. Part of this resistance to the occupation is a cultural boycott of Israel. There is a picket line that musicians and intellectuals and academics who support human rights will not cross. They will not perform or lecture or receive prizes in Israel until such time as Israel agrees to abide by international law. That is all. To be clear BDS is not an attempt to destroy the State of Israel, it is about securing basic human rights for a beleaguered people.

Back to Douglas, who would very much like to be a rock star, but instead is a retired lecturer who runs a philosophy club and self publishes his own books. Douglas chooses to support the BDS movement by paying regular visits to his local Waitrose or Sainsbury’s shops. Alongside a group of fellow activists, Douglas finds any Israeli products on the shelf, mainly dates, puts them all in a trolley, wheels them to the till, asks to speak to the manager, and asks the manager for them to be removed. Douglas doesn’t accept no for an answer. The police often come. Douglas says it works, in that it’s annoying, people don’t like it. Douglas says they’re there for change, no messing about.

There’s something comical about this scene in Sheffield city centre; - Douglas and his cronies pushing their trolley of dates, the exasperated shop manager, the police cursing under their breath. You can say what you want about the efficacy of Douglas’s direct action protest, but he’s doing what he can. It’s a tiny drop in the pond, one single rain drop, but it ripples still. Here I am writing about it. Here you are taking it in.

I have been trying to figure out how I can turn my despair into something constructive for a while now. After October 7th, I observed a sort of low grade snobbery around pro-Palestinian activism from some people around me - these people stayed quiet and lamented the lack of education that the activists who shouted ‘Free Palestine!’ had around the political complexities and the historical context of the inception of Israel, and a disdain for the dumbing down of decades of history into slogans and chants. This has dissipated somewhat in the last month as Netanyahu’s core motivations to ethnically cleanse an entire people have become more exposed.

Mostly my activism has taken the form of showing as opposed to telling. I hosted a Gig for Gaza at Brixton Academy. I projected the Palestinian flag behind me when DJ-ing to three thousand people in Bristol, I’ve written to my MP and donated. Raised funds for Warchild. I’m not looking for brownie points here. I’m writing this to say that despite all these things, I still haven’t spoken out directly on Instagram.

If I had to articulate why I have been afraid to tell as opposed to show the world how I feel until now, I would say that I am frightened. Frightened of being accused of ignorance. Frightened for my job. Frightened of receiving death threats. I am allergic to confrontation. I hate upsetting people. I worry about my Jewish friends feeling isolated and scared. I worry about being accused of anti-semitism. I can hear the naysayers now as I type, shouting at their screens as they read this. This isn’t about you! Fuck your mental health! Fuck your fear! Try telling a Gazan child about your fear! But that is my truth and I have a feeling it is not unique to me. We live in a system that has us in a chokehold when it comes to speaking out against Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

My neighbour Tom is Jewish and has for the past six weeks been writing an open letter “to those in the UK who are silent on Gaza”. He is releasing the letter in ten chapters of 1,000 words each. I receive them in my inbox every Sunday. Tom’s emails are my weekly reminder that it is neither unjust nor uneducated nor anti-semitic to act in support of basic human rights and an end to the slaughtering of innocent people.

Because when a Government policy is to occupy a neighbouring country, relentlessly displace it’s citizens, forcibly starve them to the point where they will do anything to leave, when bombs are being dropped on refugee camps, hospitals and schools, when a system of giving aid applies only to able bodied people who have to risk being shot at to acquire food for their families, when Gaza is home to more child amputees per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world, when children are being deliberately snipered in the head, words lose their meaning. The only answer is action.

In the most recent chapter of his letter, my neighbour Tom said:

“…history has shown that opposition from outside can play a very significant role in enforcing change within a society that ignores the fundamental tenets of humanity. South Africa is a case in point.”

Tom, Douglas and Hanif’s friends are all older than me, with decades of experience in living adjacent to the horrors that humanity is capable of, yet they still choose to fight for human rights in whatever ways they can. Why? Because it’s all they can do. Through all the cynicism, headfuckery and hopelessness of now, their conscious choice to act is one of the only things that makes sense.

Yesterday a group of dock workers in Southern France refused to load military equipment bound for Israel onto a cargo vessel. The crates in question carried things called links which are small metal pieces used to assist the rapid fire of bullets. On the same day Ireland’s most prestigious University Trinity College Dublin announced it’s divestment from Israel in protest of “ongoing violations of international and humanitarian law” after students set up an encampment inside the University grounds.

Activism doesn’t have to be screaming into the void on social media. And it doesn’t have to be taking down other people. It can be small and gentle as well as loud and brazen. It can be donating some money. Writing to your MP. It can be organising or joining a regular protest or organising community projects to raise funds. It can be wearing a little pin on your shirt. It can be reading Palestinian authors. It can be writing an article. It can be joining the BDS movement and boycotting Israeli products on your next shopping trip. Or like Douglas, you can hold the whole shop to account.

This genocide is a brutal reminder of the precarity and tragedy of human life. We only get one chance to live. It’s worth throwing our pebbles in the pond.

As Hanif Abdurraqib says about his friends:

“and so they spend at least some of whatever time they have left stitching together small pieces that, eventually, might make something big enough to be meaningful.”

Hope is gone. Despair remains. What will you do with yours?

Reading references.

The BDS movement.

The Jewish American writer Jasper Nathaniel on Substack is a must read, especially this piece, on trying to capture the staggering cruelty of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The growing movement of Israeli’s drawing attention to the killing of children in Gaza.

Ahmed Mor on Palestinian child amputees

Naomi Klein on Israel and the weaponisation of trauma

Rachel Shabi on the term anti-semitism losing it’s meaning.

Una Mullally on Ireland’s criticism of Israel

Jia Tolentino - My Brain Finally Broke

Hanif Abdurraqib - In Defense Of Despair

Roger Waters imploring Thom Yorke to think again about playing Tel Aviv.