The brazenness and insistence with which the United States is supporting this genocide confirms for me that the country is not truly concerned with human beings, its citizens or any others, as beings of flesh and life but as resources and means to ends. Even the protected are protected for a reason.

There is no survival guide to genocide. The meaning of survival itself is called into question during a genocide. As well as after a genocide. Perhaps it should be called into question before…

If it is impossible to love even those committing genocide, then all of our fighting is in vain.

This genocide is plainly the outgrowth and consequence of Euro-American colonialism and imperial interests. Europe and the United States are the scarlet red of the white and blue flag of this colonial outpost, this client state.

The Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces have created an extremely urgent and finite situation for the lives in Gaza. The world has only so long before the revolution instigated last year will become a revolution in remembrance of the Palestinians rather than a revolution for the Palestinians.

The geopolitical power with the most might on this planet is doing nothing with its power to prevent genocide. At the same time, it is showing very little care for its own citizens, for their education and sanity, for their health and their being able to carry on together. There seems in fact to be a tremendous investment in keeping a gulf between people, an impassable gulf that makes it impossible for the sides to join their energies and focus it where it most needs to be focused. There are not many alternative outcomes to such gross manufacturing, just as there are few outcomes for tipping a boulder off the side of a cliff. You seem to have to believe in miracles to multiply the alternatives.

The extended and expanded elimination of genocide will have to involve nations beginning to tell genuine stories of their origins and maintenance.

If you are caught in the smallest circles at times of disasters of the greatest magnitudes, then you must start there in those circles, speaking and acting out there. How will your voice be heard, your choices matter, in the largest round when they are of no account in your little ring?

We might as well write what we write then light it aflame. This is our writing to posterity now.

Genocide does not consist in the images. Nor does genocide reside there. Genocide is the elimination of a world, of worlds, human worlds.

Genocide is the fulfillment of some fantasy in which one world swallows whole all other worlds, or expels them, gives them no space.

You can find all sorts of private meanings in the midst of a live genocide. You can go about your projects, have your conversations, make your loves, devote yourselves to your crafts and service. But the common, the shared world is shattered with genocide. Just as much as it is shattered in genocide. Genocide is precisely the shattering of the shared world by some monstrous private world parading as the universal.

Genocidal acts fall somewhere along a spectrum, and genocide can happen in stages. There can be genocidal terror and a genocidal atmosphere even in the absence of explicit genocidal acts. A constant threat of genocide in order to achieve the closest alternative: ethnic cleansing, expulsion, “magical disappearance.”

The past is not even past, Mr. Sapolsky keeps repeating. Whenever you are asked to deny history in the pursuit of the future, note that something is terribly awry, that you are being manipulated in order to accept a deranged future. The Nakba is one prolonged nakba, that has continued unabated for seventy-five years.

We cannot seek out a hope with which to start. Our only hope is to begin with hopelessness.

The weight on our souls now is not only to honor the lives of the more than thirty thousand Palestinians slaughtered by the Israeli government and its supporters, but to not lose, or not lose sight of the fight for which they were murdered. The fight for the right of return, for self-determination, for humanity among humanity. Against the empire, against colonialism and the lies told in its favor for centuries.

True enlightenment now might be revolting and horrifying, rather than light and beatific and transcendent. Not to say that there is no lightness and beatitude, only that they might not be appropriate just now.

The smallness of our worlds will be what destroys us, like our private pains and enjoyments, our private fantasies and travesties. The rest of the world, the shared world, can burn around these like so many inconveniences.

All the privileges that come with living in the United States are privileges soaked in blood and caked in delusion.

Some people had the gall and ghoulishness to sign the bombs on their way to destroy generations of Palestinian lives and their homes, while millions of us sign the bombs without moving a finger…precisely by not moving a finger.

You cannot prevent what has already occurred. The prevention of genocide must apply to warranted suspicions of occurring genocide, rather than only to acts and occasions that have been ruled as genocide.

It was some form of justice that got us to where we are now. Justice is impossible.

How many towns and cities in the United States are there that don’t want to hear a peep about Palestine, about genocide, about the rights of the oppressed? Key West, Florida is one of those towns, whose mask is a thick silence and the blindness the sunshine, or the alcohol or the fantasy, causes.

One of the only alternatives we have to perpetuating the systems of oppression is to throw our lives away without a care.

One says, “I want to eliminate the oppressor.” The other says, “I want to eliminate the oppressed in their very response to oppression, in their very reminder that they are oppressed.” Perhaps the latter will not put it so–eloquently, if they still put it as bluntly. To call them both genocidal might be accurate, but it is not honest.

States are cruel and stupid. All of them, to varying degrees. They are rooted in an irrationality so outrageous that any love of them is the result of steady training, or of coercion or force.

The entire military-industrial-prison complex is one prolonged mockery, the making-impossible, of the process of truth and reconciliation.

Humans seem not only headed for annihilation, but for annihilation with vindictiveness attached to it as though a natural growth.  Even at the end, we will make sure there is someone, or something, to blame.

One thing the nihilist has right is that we are still fighting a local fight even in the fight against genocide. There is still darkness and triple darkness and speechless stars all around us as we rage. Yet we cry, enraged, into this darkness, which darkness is part and parcel of the courage of the call.

The most reasonable reaction to lies and criminality on this scale is madness.

It is good that we are speaking out, demonstrating and organizing, but we have to prepared to do it for at least a couple generations. We are fighting phenomena that took fold after fold to unfold, and unfolding them, or attempting to unfold them, might take all the folds we have left.

God is rubble now, and broken bones and torn flesh beneath the rubble.

But we would collapse, Nietzsche told us, if we became thoroughly familiar with the whole of it, the whole of the suffering of existence. As we can see from those who are in the realm of suffering’s maximum–and who have collapsed. Suffering’s maximum is not the same as suffering’s whole, however, so some still stand. Our standing with them must be a preparing ourselves for the hardest. Approaching the maximum.

If we are waiting for a leader, or a hero, or a group of leaders or heroes to lead us out of this genocide, this inhumanity, we are lost. The hero is the next person you meet who can face one shred of this inhumanity without collapsing.

The very “way of life” of the United States or other nations that see it as emblematic or as a model is genocidal. Perhaps…more than perhaps…”nation” itself means–genocide.

There is a finite number of times we can fail at preventing genocide. Very finite.

Nothing is settled. Everything should be unsettled, in fact. The settlers, first of all, and the oppressed and onlookers in their contention with the settlers. Beware of your own use of the phrase “to settle.” Beware of the compromises, the neglect of the other and of history, the violence it can hold. Unsettling, yes, but nothing is settled.

There are too many criminals in genocide to prosecute, and too much ambiguity in the criminality. What must be prosecuted or condemned is the (settler-colonial) system itself.

We see people going about the same dreams as our forebears, when it could be the dreams themselves that are the issue. We might have to dream to dream anew, or wait through the nightmare for an indefinite period of time, without dreams.

The genocide is combined with femicide, homicide, infanticide, ecocide, domicide, politicide, epistemicide and, alas–among a host of other deaths and killings, inevitably–suicide.

It would be a bit unreasonable to ask that everyone acknowledge the genocide. The genocide would not be possible in the first place without its deniers. The committers of genocide themselves have trouble admitting to genocide as genocide, as dehumanization is constitutive of its perpetuation, and you would have to admit to killing humans to admit to genocide.

If someone is truly supporting the genocide out of cowardice, then I am afraid for that person, and I am afraid for that person’s friends and family.

Sometimes an irrational belief if perfectly, robustly justified. Like the belief that we could have done more when we very well could not have.

If you do not have the wherewithal to discuss and fight the genocide with the next person you meet, the least you can do is show that person that she is worthy to be alive.

In the eternal recurrence, there will be the same deadening oblivion in the next round as there was in the last. Awakening has to happen once and now for it to happen again.

We are probably off the mark when we consider granting or acknowledging the right of others to be fully-fledged human beings. We are obviously all still incomplete ourselves insofar as this is a matter of debate and persuasion.

Yes, your confusion and stuttering and stumbling on the way to the demonstration is itself a form of activism, even if you never make it there.

The law preventing and punishing genocide is the darkest cry of the Law, the law that, if not upheld, calls into question every law, the meaning of law.

It is not sustainable, living in a country that asks its citizens to mindlessly and heartlessly support a genocide, or trains them to do so. It is only so long before such tactics are either defeated, or made more gruesome and belligerent. If the latter, then they become more intolerable, less sustainable, and therefore it will take longer for them to be defeated. It will cost–everyone–more.

All of our festivities or events or gatherings should at the very least remark on the genocide before commencing or at some point of the occasion, or the occasion becomes grotesque.