The Bloodbath Continues

After 300 days or so since the October 7th attacks in Israel, the genocide of Gaza and the Westbank continues largely uninterrupted. Other mass killings in Sudan and elsewhere also continue along with ongoing massacres in Ukraine. None of these conflicts have much hope in sight.

Coincidentally, during these conflicts I have been progressively reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. If there is one message about war that echoes through time it is that it is both horrible and also a self propelling force. Once started, conflict, war, death and self-sacrifice by perfectly normal people becomes a growing snowball that carries forward despite any efforts to slow or stop it. The momentum of a conflict only stops once one side is completely destroyed or a stalemate emerges. Ukraine is leaning towards a stalemate. Gaza is leaning towards complete destruction. In Tolstoy’s Russia, the Napoleonic wars only ended when Napoleon’s 600,000 strong army was reduced to 50,000 thanks to Russian efforts, the scale of Russia and particularly, Russia’s winter. After that debacle, the end of Napoleon was inevitable.

Despite all the protests and all the efforts by Palestinian and Human Rights advocates around the world, Israel continues to erase Palestine from the face of the Earth. As the French Holocaust survivor stated, at this point the only thing we can do is document and bear witness to the genocide so that one day, maybe, some people may be held accountable. Like the genocide in Rwanda, the massacres in East Timor or the deaths by Pol Pot, the current war is a train that cannot be stopped until everyone is dead or incapacitated. There seems to be no one from the outside that will or can intercede and as long as the United States keeps sending money and weaponry to Israel, the Israeli nationalists will continue working hard to fulfill their clearly stated aim of establishing a Greater Israel that includes all of Biblical Israel and maybe more, even if the country is built on the corpses of Palestinian women and children.

There is little hope things will change, but let us at least document those are guilty and those who are complicit in these war crimes. One day we will look back on this massacre in the same way we look back on so many of our crimes.