If you’re a regular visitor to my website you may have noticed that it’s been a little quiet here recently. I’ve not been posting any new poems, or getting up on my soapbox and sounding off about anything and everything. There’s been tumbleweed and cobwebs, and precious little else.
Some of that’s down to behind-the-scenes digital admin: shifting the website hosting from one place to another, updating gubbins, fettling the whatchamacallit. All stuff I don’t really understand, and which I leave in the hands of people who do. Which is obviously my cue to publicly offer my huge thanks to them, the incredible People Who Do. Magicians, as far as I’m concerned. Both of them.
Mainly, though, the silence has been down to something far more fundamental. I’ve been dumbstruck by what’s happening in the world. Israel is busy committing genocide in Palestine, and I’ve been unable to find the words that will describe how I feel about the failure of our political leaders to call it out, or our media to accurately report it. We are still supplying arms to Israel, still flying spy flights over Gaza, still allowing British citizens to go and fight for another country, fight in an army we know – from footage shared by their own soldiers – is committing war crimes. We are complicit in the murder and deliberate starvation of innocent men, women, and children, and the political judgement seems to be that this is all OK. That it’s a price worth paying – especially as that price is paid by someone else, in their flesh and blood.
Eight months into a genocide, our media continue to attempt to manufacture consent for (or at the very least, acquiescence to) what’s happening, and politicians inch from threadbare platitudes about self defence to well-worn ones about regretting loss of life, but do nothing to halt the flow of weapons to a murderous regime. Set against this, polls consistently show the majority of people oppose what the Israeli government is doing; hundreds of thousands march each week to voice their support for an immediate ceasefire; Palestine Action regularly protest outside factories belonging to Israeli arms company Elbit in this country (shutting at least one permanently); students are pressuring universities to divest from Israeli companies and institutions; multinational companies which operate in Israel are seeing profits drop because of boycotts.
The best time for a ceasefire was months ago. The second best time is now.
Oh, and if you’re still telling yourself that what’s happening is complicated… It isn’t. If you can work out how to use an iPhone 15 or negotiate your way through a ticket buying website, you can manage – eight months in – to take a point of view on the inhumanity of using the world’s most advanced warplanes to fire 2000lb bombs at unarmed people living in tents.
Seriously, you can.
Speak up and speak out. It seems I’ve finally found my words.