Nobody Can Support This Once They See It. "Pure Panic Everywhere You Look," "Gaza Is Under A Complete Seige. No Water, No Food, No Electricity, and No Escape."

"We are not strangers to war but how it feels this time, it's hard to find the words."

Abandon your positions, all. We’re in a terra incognita, a brand new hell— a completely devastating world of ruin, where (from the comfort of computer screens) leading Western “intellectuals” are backing the “liquidation” of innocent men, women and children in Gaza. The pressure was intense, to not object, due to the intensity of the atrocities, such as they were reported to us, such as we understood them. We struggled to figure out what was real and what was atrocity propaganda. Meanwhile, to me at least, the reality of the seige on Gaza remained remote. It was plumes of smoke, and Joe Biden or Anthony Blinken standing at a lectern, muttering the usual platitudes.

We all speak of things not seeming real, these days— things being staged, cloudy, unsourced, impossible to know.

I took a break from the book work and went for a walk, uneasy, queasy, suddenly wanting to cry, but trapped in a rubbery numbness, which has been in place since the late winter of 2020.

I can’t call my father, he’s dead. He loved Israel and supported her with heart and soul, as many American Jews do, understandably.

I really needed to talk to him, and to release myself from the straightjackets of guilt. Nausea was present. Hamas is not the Palestinian people; Netanyahu is not the Israeli people.

I do not believe he would have supported this.

Everybody’s trying to figure out whether it’s alright to express horror over the Gaza siege, and somehow, even though we know 2.2 million people live there, and half are apparently children, we still seek permission to be horrified. We seek the right words to say: “We don’t condone the atrocities of Hamas.” “We don’t support terrorism.” “We don’t condone babies heads being cut off!” Amidst all this, many social media channels went back and forth about whether the babies found mutilated was “real” or not, and of course, what role Israel played in either allowing this to happen or, possibly, worse.

Came back to hotel room and typed in “Gaza” on an Instagram search.

Maybe it’s best I don’t comment or narrate much, except to say, it was, for me, the first time I actually was exposed to the reality of what is happening there, as I type this, as you read it.

Everybody may as well abandon anything they thought they knew, along with well guarded positions on this. It is actually possible to see it, with your own eyes, by typing “Gaza” into the search bar, and watching even a few minutes of the documentary reels the local people and journalists have put up.

Once you see it, everything falls away, except shock, sorrow, and grief. You were asked to view these people as less than human, or be indifferent to their plight because of what Hamas did.

We have many rights, but we do not have the right to not see what is now-see-able, from Gaza.

It is an atrocity beyond measure.

Every last human being must cease tribalist bloodlust expressions and demand an immediate TRUCE. I quickly collected some reels and images and share them here, in haste. You can follow the linked accounts, and you can choose to see more of this or you can choose to look away.

I am stone cold horrified and my heart is pounding.

I am no longer worried about seeming disloyal to my Jewish family or people I know who “support Israel.” I believe there is no such position anymore—Israel has bombed it to dust and blood. The blood of innocent children, and human beings, who did nothing (needless to say) to deserve this. Once you see the images and video footage, you will find there is quite literally no such thing as “supporting this.”

Yesterday Greg Reese told me Christians are supporting this, and I scarcely believed him. I think they would no longer do so if they saw these images.

Everything people once “thought” or “believed” is mute now. As for disapproval and scorn, accusations of being insensitive to the plight of Israel, I’ll take it, I don’t care. The Jerusalem Post has reported four out of five Israelis now believe the Israeli government of Netanyahu is complicit in the Hamas led massacre that precipitated this.

But this is a seige of completely trapped people, cruelly instructed by Netanyahu to “get out now.” As one video journalist said: “We have been told to get out, but where do we go and how do we get there?”

Video clips are linked, between the photos.

A few minutes of life in Gaza right now, here.

Man carries his dead son in his arms.

Woman finds out she lost her whole family.

Severely injured boy comforts his father in the hospital.

Man carries his dead daughter.