Fiona Lang

Israel’s genocidal mayhem has given me a hideous understanding into the great horrors of the past. How could so many people who regard themselves as decent, humane, ‘moderate’ become complicit in unspeakable atrocities? It’s something I’ve always wondered. After all, only a tiny proportion of any society are actually sociopaths. Well, this great crime of our age offers the answers. The British media and political elites are full of people who aren’t even pretending. Their worldview is clear. Israelis are “us”. Palestinians are “them”. Accordingly, every Israeli life has meaning and value - it is inherently precious. A Palestinian life is worth virtually nothing. It is less than cheap. A bag of rats drowned in a lake is likely to elicit more sympathy. Violence against a single Israeli life - “us” - is therefore seen as intolerable and unbearable. Endless violence against countless Palestinians, on the other hand, doesn’t even produce a genuine emotional response. We’ve seen this tested to destruction. It doesn’t matter what the atrocity is. Newborns cooked alive in rubble, or left to suffocate and rot in bombed hospitals. 6 year olds shot in the head by snipers. Terrified children deliberately blown apart in their families’ cars by tanks, the paramedics sent to save them butchered, too. Entire family bloodlines exterminated in moments. Detainees gang raped. Bodies thrown from roofs. Civilians riddled with bullets while trying to get food. The worst imaginable atrocities committed over and over again, but because the victims are Palestinian, no outrage or horror or anguished demands that this must stop, whatever it takes. There is, at best, empty handwringing and platitudes, while our government continues to arm the perpetrators. But when an attack is launched against Israel in which not a single Israeli is killed, then there is wall to wall horror, disgust, outrage from our political and media elites. So if you’re wondering how so many who regarded themselves as decent, modest, upstanding, morally sophisticated citizens actively made themselves complicit in all the horrors of the past you read about in books - well, now you know. What mattered to them was who was “us” and who was “them”. I used to passionately disagree with these elites - I work, after all, in the British media, and have now for 13 years: even hold them in contempt. But it took this genocide to make me realise: I don’t live in the same moral universe as these people. They now disgust me: I am repulsed by them. It is what it is: my job is to be honest about my opinions, and I could pretend this isn’t how I feel, but for what moral reason? I’m not telling you because it’s cathartic, even though it is. It’s because what I feel is felt by many others, and that matters - a lot. Millions of people in every country, on every continent, are feeling this, and it gets stronger with every passing day, The consequences will be felt for many, many generations.