The Terror and Ecstasy of Living

No one is coming to save Gaza. Not the Saudis, not Trump, not the Democrats, not China. It's up to you.

Ramy Abdu: “Breaking: The child Mohammad Jamil Al-Harazin was killed by Israeli drone fire on Al-Mansoura Street in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, east of Gaza City, while he was trying to get food from his home.”

Yesterday I went to the DC Arab American Culture Festival. Organizer and classical screamer extraordinaire Fairouz Foty asked me to make some remarks.

I talked for a second about my confronting Blinken — the sense of obligation of doing all I could given the realities in Gaza, overcoming the desire to crawl back into bed — and the sheer ecstasy of meaningfully engaging the world.

And then I laid out a few strategic ideas for protests in DC. I’ll probably post these in the coming days.

I stressed to the people there that Trump wasn’t going to save Palestine, nor were the Saudis, nor were the Democrats.

So many people have been deluded about Trump’s trip to the Mideast, pretending he’s actually trying to stop Netanyahu’s slaughter or some such.

And a friend at the event yesterday at some point was telling me how more and more Democrats are saying decent things. It’s sort of true and it’s mostly irrelevant. Some Democrats may be saying more reasonable things — because they know they have no influence over Trump. They are largely posing now that doing so will have minimal effect.

And the Saudis and other “cuckoo sheikdoms” as Eqbal Ahmad would call them will do nothing but rhetoric, as was apparent with my questioning them last year about their lack of action on Gaza and the dynamics of Biden’s 2022 trip, as I wrote in detail at the time.

The evening ended with an activist saying that China was doing air drops of aid into Gaza. For a second I was excited, but there’s no evidence for it at all. Still, some BRICS-aligned journalists like Pepe Escobar are hyping up these false claims, which are all over TikTok.

It’s so easy to think that some politician will finally stand up to the system or some alleged rival to the US establishment will swoop in and save the day.

They won’t.

And on those rare occasions when they do, it will be because some good people pushed them into doing the right thing. That’s pretty much what happened with the campaign to get South Africa to invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel. And note that now Trump is going after South Africa with phony charges of “white genocide”.

There’s some beauty in protests, thousands of people marching in some city. Chanting. Holding signs. But those protests largely happen on the weekend. People shouting at empty buildings. But I go to these sometimes. I might go to the one in DC today. Mostly as a way of connecting with others who might be up to something interesting.

To not feel isolated.

But it’s not what’s needed.

The raft is not the shore.

The minimum of what’s needed is protests in front of government buildings, think tanks, media, big tech and other companies with cutting-edge material being handed out as those making genocide happen walk into those buildings. Literally bringing it to their doorstep. I hope to be able to write up such material.

This coming week, Veterans For Peace and Friends of Sabeel NA will be starting a fast in front of the US mission to the UN. I still don’t know what my role in that will be, other than doing news releases with these good folks via my accuracy.org day job. My health has been shaky since the concussion, the physical therapy is going soso, I get headaches every day. Fatigue. Lots of fatigue. Sometimes dizziness and nausea.

There’s a terror to living. To feel decisions and guide things. We may feel it to some extent in our personal lives, as we form and end relationships, to the extent those are conscious decisions and not sleepwalking or doing what’s expected of us. When we sing a song or write an article we genuinely feel.

But to take on the role altering the course of human events. We think it’s beyond our reach, but it isn’t. There are opportunities every day that we avert our eyes from because we’re afraid of seeing reality and the terror and ecstasy of living.

That comes from being genuinely independent — not being an appendage to any power structure. Not the DNC or RNC or any media clique or BRICS or anyone else and to see the world as it is.

The student encampments have not blossomed and spread as they should, but there’s been some glimmers from recent statements by students like NYU student Logan Rozos and George Washington University student Cecilia Culver.

Many in Gaza are dying. But few elsewhere are living.

Ramy Abdu: “Sensitive content: Images of a child—one of dozens of children burned alive by Israel in their tents in southern Gaza just moments ago.”