The work consists of 5 Parts under the main question of, “Who Bombs Hospitals and Inherits the Earth?”(Fady Joudah), and are as follows:
- PART ONE: Spiritual Warfare and the Soul of Humanity
- PART TWO: Gaza: An Awakening and Unflinching Litmus Test
- PART THREE: Gaza, the Collective Shadow and Why Caring is Critical
- PART FOUR: Beyond Genocide into a New World
- PART FIVE: My Work Going Forward
PART TWO: Gaza: An Awakening and Unflinching Litmus Test
“We are witnessing levels of evil that are impossible to process. We don’t have a vocabulary for it” ~ Matt Kennard, journalist and author
Gaza has catalyzed millions globally through the live-streaming for the very first time in human history an AI-enabled, industrial-scale Genocide and one of the worst man-made famines in the 21st century … in all their horror, cruelty and agony upon a besieged and defenseless population. The most unprecedented and shocking in recent times and that exposed international leadership, trapped as it is in the vice-grips of an old paradigm based upon separation-consciousness, intentionally failing to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing, warcrimes, crimes against humanity, and instead, provide the cover and the capacity for these with complete, unconditional impunity.
And it continues and metastasizes even now as the corpses continue to pile up.
Remembering that All is One and the current Spiritual War for the Soul of Humanity as per Part One, what follows is a reflection of the manifestation of profound disconnection in our and humanity’s collective body.
It’s a reflection that requires tremendous courage, radical compassion and fortitude to digest, along with the recognition, honouring and allowing of grief, shock, personal accountability, rage, frustration, complicity and repulsion as part of evolving beyond what allows this, and what it is doing to the Soul of Humanity in the normalization of this very public, expanding extermination campaign.
It points to the depths of unconscionable depravity within which the status quo operates, and has always operated, with Gaza the canary in the coalmine that even now, coming up to the one-year mark, continues to reveal more of that status quo, exploding as it is like a Pandora’s Box, no matter the concerted attempts to muzzle and distort what is being revealed.
In a world where information is radically decentralized and democraticized as never before, there is nowhere to hide. You just can’t get away with things as was possible in the past.
… Namely, that the separation-based status quo, the old order, doesn’t care about you, and it doesn’t care about the Earth, other human beings or animals. The global polycrisis and its threshold points reflect this.
Ultimately, crimes against humanity are not just about a certain group: they are crimes against each of us, all of humanity, and striking right at the core of what it means to be human, respectful of human rights, sovereignty, freedom and dignity. And as mentioned in Part One, we feel these crimes and we are affected by them all in terms of our own
wellbeing and evolutionary trajectory because All is One.
That’s the Big Shift: All is One.
It is all connected and interwoven in interbeing and interdependence, and all lives within the world, holographically and archetypally within each of us.
What follows further below is a breakdown of the elements of this Genocide for those who don’t know the full measure of
the assault upon Gaza and upon humanity before we go into why it’s personally important to you to care in Part Three: “Gaza, the Collective Shadow and Why Caring is Critical”.
We go into it because you cannot jump straight into ‘peace’, ‘healing’, ‘wellbeing’ or ‘unity’ for yourself of the collective without splitting, bypassing and fragmenting yourself if you have not first passed through the shadowlands of impacted generational trauma, and the seeing and accountability the shadowlands demand. Shadow recognition and metabolization come before personal and collective transformation, wisdom and conscious creating can be the outcomes and fruits.
We go into all with eyes and hearts wide open because our current systems of therapy, transformation and healing, and that have arisen out of this same system, are failing us, the collective and the Earth in numerous ways, and at times, even reinforcing our personal and generational traumas for the sake of manufactured consent and complicity. It has us
defining ‘success’ (material, emotional, spiritual etc) within the same, destructive parameters that we are ultimately aching to be free of, but that contribute to polycrisis instead.
As we see and digest how trauma and the old system lives within us and what the system’s leaders are doing in our names in Gaza and elsewhere, we come to fully deconstruct out of it, heal and make better choices.
As we go deeper and deeper into the shadow, we see that such crimes against humanity originate out of states of deep fear, disconnection, survival-thinking and unprocessed personal, ancestral and intergenerational trauma. Trauma that must be acted out and projected onto ‘the other’ in enemy-consciousness.
Gaza shows us how human beings see and imagine themselves. Separate and afraid. Disconnected. Unsafe in this world, unworthy, inferior. Not belonging. Then conversely, superior, inflated, invincible. Needing to control, seek
revenge, oppress, punish or kill in order to feel validated, real, safe and worthy.
So much unresolved pain and distortion ...
Trauma yearns to be seen, reconciled and healed in radical compassion. Its stories told. Until then, it can only be cruelly outpictured in the trashing, desecration and polycrisis we see metastasizing globally, and in places such as Gaza.
Genocide is a crime against humanity that must be recognized, named and rejected.
In a joint report, the Boston University School of Law and the University network for Human Rights found
Israel has committed genocidal acts, namely killing, seriously harming, and
inflicting conditions of life calculated, and intended to, bring about
the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.
The UN has estimated that over 40% of the 186,000 (conservative figures according to esteemed journal, The Lancet, in mid-June 2024) brutally slaughtered since October 2023 are children. If the current rate of extermination continues (about 23,000 per month), by the end of the year there will be 335,500 slaughtered (as per Professor Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, and written for the The Guardian in September 2024).
Numerous academics, genocide historians and scholars, law scholars, civil society organizations, human rights groups and lawyers, doctors, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the European Convention on Human Rights, aid workers, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Francesca Albanese),
and others have indicated that the legal threshold of genocide has been met in Gaza, and as per the genocidal intent from officials at Israel’s highest levels of government, media commentators and elsewhere.
Gaza is the size of Stradbroke Island or Detroit and, to date, Israel has dropped the equivalent of 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza’s population since October 2023, which overwhelmingly exceeds the total bombings of London, Hiroshima and Dresden during WWII, and as mainly supplied by the United States, followed by Germany, along with the UK, Italy, Australia and others.
Perhaps you know or have seen the footage, too, of how babies and children (and women and men) are being dehumanized and exterminated:
killed by amputations and loss of blood, burned alive, rapid gunfire and carpet bombing, point blank extrajudicial assassination, blown apart by airstrikes, decapitation, vaporized and disappeared via internationally prohibited weapons, left to die in incubators due to fuel being cut-off, food-borne illnesses, sea or contaminated water, severe intolerable burns to the body, infections from injuries and surgeries (often without anaesthetic), run
over and/or buried alive by a tank, tank shelling, buried alive, trapped, crushed, asphyxiated under rubble, mauled by dogs trained by the IDF, pre-existing health conditions and blockade on medicine, liquefied internal organs from bomb force, white phosphorous melting/burning right to the bone, point blank execution, sniper fire to the head or chest, heart attack from pure fear and excess adrenaline, bombs exposing brain matter and bombs hollowing out their heads, freezing to death in tents in dead of winter, overheating in tents in hot summer temperatures, starvation and dehydration due to deliberately blocked aid
Trapped in what is known as a ‘killing cage’ because all borders are blocked, tens of thousands are missing,
and tens of thousands of children are orphaned, kidnapped, unaccompanied or separated from their families, roaming from place to place to place due to bombing and violent, forcible transfers. And recently, the first confirmed cases of childhood polio have been discovered in Gaza.
In Gaza, you tell them how old your blown-apart, incinerated or evaporated child was and they give you varying amounts of raw or charred flesh in a new plastic bag or perhaps an old bag that once had rice in it so you can lay them to rest. You don’t even know if the flesh belonged to your child, or a child or adult.
The slaughterhouse is now becoming minced meat ~ Mariam Barghouti, journalist, writer, commentator
In Gaza, you can hear the screams of loved ones trapped under the rubble and who will die there because the machinery to get them out has been destroyed.
My hands are torn from digging for my children ~ Nida Khan
In Gaza, civilians have been both targeted and indiscriminately bombed: babies, children, men and women, pregnant women, doctors, nurses, an unprecedented number of journalists (170), engineers, writers, professors, bakers, teachers, farmers, healthworkers (885), poets, aid workers (289), whether Muslim or Christian.
Considered by the UN to be the deadliest conflict since its founding, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian reported in August 2024 that of 280 aidworkers killed in 33 countries during 2023, 163 of them were killed in Gaza alone in the first 3 months, mostly as a result of airstrikes.
The UN Commission of Inquiry reported in mid-June 2024 to the Human Rights Council in Geneva:
Israel authorities are responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, including extermination, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, murder or wilful killing, using starvation as a method of war, forcible transfer, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, sexual and gender based violence amounting to torture, and cruel or inhuman treatment.
Total siege of the Gaza Strip has weaponized the provision of life-sustaining necessities for strategic and political gains, include cutting off supplies of water, food, electricity, fuel and other essential supplies, including humanitarian assistance. It constitutes collective punishment, is proportionately impacting Palestinian women and persons with disabilities and is causing grave harm to children, including starvation-related deaths.
Dehumanizing the entire group and enforcing collective punishment and other warcrimes upon Gaza’s population, it’s a generational killing where 2000+ families have been completely erased from the archival record.
The Israeli government has closed all the borders and withheld food, water, electricity, medicine and fuel. It deliberately created a famine. It has blown up hospitals, mosques, churches, schools and universities, cultural institutions, UN facilities, telecommunications towers. Over half of Gaza’s homes and 80% of commercial properties have been damaged
or destroyed.
Countless US-made 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs have been dropped, which were used in Afghanistan onto tent cities which refugees were told were ‘safe places’. Whole streets and neighbourhoods have been obliterated. Ambulances attacked. Water tanks and sanitation facilities destroyed. Maintenance depots bombed. Fuel for desalination
plants to provide drinkable water blocked.
People are notified of displacement via leaflets dropping from the air, forcing them to flee within just minutes to previously bombed-out cities and where they are sniped along the ‘road’, or have to sleep on the ‘streets’, near
decomposing bodies and sewerage. Mass graves and the smell of blood are everywhere.
Amputations, surgeries, eye removal due to shrapnel and c-sections take place without anaesthetics. Dogs and cats eat
decomposing bodies.
100% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million are displaced. Kidnapping and arrest of children, women, men, doctors,
aidworkers are widespread. Looting and killing sprees by Israel’s soldiers are celebrated, videoed and uploaded to TikTok. Immunity and praise have been given by the government to Occupation soldiers who rape, torture and sodomize prisoners in detention centres. Called ‘heroes’, there have been riots in their support for the right to rape prisoners.
Both land and air are poisoned, agriculture destroyed. Cemeteries destroyed. Livestock, animals, pets, birds slaughtered. Mass graves, with organs found to be removed from the dead. Sexual violence, strip-searching and solitary confinement are reported by children (as revealed by Save the Children) who have been released from Israeli military detention.
In Gaza, there is no need for propaganda to be created: the reality is unbearably stark, day in and day out, and
speaks for itself in the form of genocide, pedocide, ecocide, scholasticide, domicide, femicide, infanticide, urbicide, necrocide.
*
Maybe you have noticed how some deaths in the world are considered valuable and are thus individuated, mourned and considered an outrage, ‘a universe destroyed’. Especially, white Western ones. For these deaths, we will receive enormous details and repeated footage, we will know names, stories and family members. And yes, yes, yes: a death is tragic, is a world extinguished and to be mourned. On the other hand, deaths in Gaza and in other ‘meaningless places’ in the world are described only in undifferentiated numerical terms (if mentioned at all), rendering them anonymous victims without names, personal histories and lives, individuality or family.
You see, in the hierarchy of value and as with other groups considered inferior, ‘animals’ or subhuman, they have never counted as humans to begin with. They were deliberately dehumanized and are considered disposable by those at the
highest levels of authority globally and within our educational and cultural systems, too. In Gaza’s case, to enable, finance and profit from Genocide in myriad ways.
In this old paradigm …
The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The
only legal thing the rest of us can do is watch them die. And be silent ~ Arundhati Roy, author and activist
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice found Israel responsible for multiple and serious international law violations towards Palestinians, including for apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and ruled that it end its illegal occupation. In a September 2024 historic vote, the UN General Assembly voted unanimously (124-24)
to impose sanctions on Israel and orders to end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem).
Global organizations advocating for ceasefire include: Amnesty Int, Human Rights Watch, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), United Nations (UN), International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), Oxfam, Save the Children, International Federation for Human rights (FIDH), Global Centre for the
Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P), World Health Organization (WHO), CARE International, UNICEF, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Arab League Organization of Islamic
Cooperation (OIC), B’Tselem and others.
“I’ve lived through many wars in Gaza, but something very different about this genocide is the intensity of the weapons and bombs. When I visit a
location that has been recently bombed, I see flesh all over the walls and bodies torn to pieces. They are using powerful weapons that shred bodies beyond recognition, many times we are unable to figure out how many are dead because there’s no bodies. It’s all flesh and pieces” ~ Hossam Shabat, one of the few remaining journalists in Gaza
Gaza is a litmus test because it’s a very public extermination of a people, called out globally, but being deliberately being allowed.
Gaza is not a test to see how far status quo leadership will go. We already know there’s no ‘red line’. Neither in Gaza nor in countless other locations globally. It is a test for you, though, to see how far you’ll courageously go to stop the abuse and to establish another reality other than the one we’re living.
Gaza has exposed the cruelty, opportunism, cracks and stagnation in our global systems through which genocidaires slip and operate, all the while gaslighting us and manufacturing our consent for their crimes.
What could be more a more profound evil than the slaughtering of children? ~ John Cusack, actor and activist
Gaza, along with other places currently enduring a Genocide, has exploded global systems of ideology and belief that enable the harm of innocents despite legally binding resolutions and lofty ideals and spiritual platitudes, and the full impunity of global perpetrators at the highest levels of authority.
Gaza shows that global obligations to prevent and stop Genocide, as well as ensure non-complicity with it, are being purposely and actively avoided, opposed, overriden. That the calling forth of such obligations is selective, hypocritical. And that those who call out Genocide or hypocrisy are targeted, smeared, fired, punished, cancelled.
It's a season of unmasking, of veils lifted. We are seeing our collective soul with a clarity that is disorienting. Listen for the apathy, the cruelty and neglect. Then listen closely for all who dare to resist ~ Cole Arthur Riley, writer, poet, author
Gaza as a litmus test asks us what is it in the human psyche … what splitting of consciousness and imagined separation from the Web of Life … what illness in the Soul … what blindness in the Heart … what belief systems … allow, fund, support, remain silent to, celebrate, plan for, provide cover for the most heinous and criminal of crimes against humanity,
Genocide?
The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable ~ Arundhati Roy, author and activist
Gaza is the Terrible Gift to humanity, wrought out of anguish, penetrating, awakening, pointing the way beyond separation-consciousness, pathology and illness, fracturing and fragmentation … into re-humanization and
full humanness. Free.
Gaza invites us into the full renewal and regeneration of humanity, the Earth and all its species in right relationship and harmony…just as so many ancient Calendars and Indigenous prophecies have foretold for this timeframe.
Gaza pleads with us the healing of the Children of the Earth, the restoration of the Mother and the respect of the Feminine Principle in this exquisite and sublime, intelligent domain called Earth.
Earth, this rare Library, Living Matrix and Shining Jewel of Life.
And you and I, magnificently unique and loved always, no matter how far we may stray from ourselves in the Great Play of Consciousness.
Refaat Alareer, Palestinian writer, poet, translator, university professor and activist. Poem written days before he was killed in Gaza, 6 December 2023 (along with his brother, sister and four of his nephews) and that went viral.
(c) Fatima Bacot All Rights reserved