Mona Eltahawy Instagram – Eyes still on Gaza. The genocide that Israel is committing there will haunt us all. Gaza will haunt us all, demanding “Where were you?” decades from now. Understand this: ending the genocide in Gaza is for the sake of our collective humanity.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has made clear how unfree we are.
While millions have marched and protested to demand Israel stop, elected officials refuse to stop Israel. Joe Biden can with one phone call end the genocide. Instead he arms & defends Israel.
Just as too many (read: white people in the U.S. and their elected leaders) refused to see the fascism that Trump heralded, because for them fascism was something that happened in 1945, too many refuse to see genocide too, thinking it began and ended with the Holocaust.
And the common factor in their kinship to victims of fascism and genocide is that they look or sound like them.
I am not Palestinian. Just as I am not Rwandan, Just as I am not Bosnian. I am human. And genocide diminishes us all.
Genocide dehumanizes us. All.
In 2017, I went to Rwanda for genocide commemoration along with a France-based anti-racist group which took a group of us to pay respects at sites where French troops aided & abetted the slaughter they knew was happening.
France enabled the genocide.
There will be future visits to commemorate and pay respect in Gaza for the genocide there that Israel is comitting and which the U.S. is arming and enabling with 2,000lb bombs aimed at destroying and exterminating Palestinians.
As we commemorate that genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda 30 years ago, let us remember what we owed and failed to deliver to the people of that country.
It is what our political leaders owe and have failed to deliver to the people of Gaza.
We owe it to ourselves to bear witness to how each successive genocide diminishes us.
Gaza will haunt us all, demanding “Where were you?” decades from now. Understand this: ending the genocide in Gaza is for the sake of our collective humanity.
Link in my bio to my essay | Posted on 14/Apr/2024 21:28:43
