An overview of Al Jazeera’s investigation into the ‘live streamed genocide’ in Gaza. “This is the film you will not see on the BBC, CNN or any of the other Western Media. Over the last year we have witnessed what is the greatest crime of the 21st century, and perversely it's a crime that has been meticulously documented and presented to us by the people who are carrying it out…what it reveals is truly shocking… No one can say they didn't know. The Israelis could not have made it clearer to us what they were doing in their rhetoric, social media they were posting, and what their own media was saying – that this was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, quite possibly an exercise in genocide. They were making it abundantly clear to us, and if we are ignorant we are wilfully ignorant.” Also see Democracy Now!’s coverage of the film, and this piece from susan abulhawa.

“Palestine has been a replay of a 200 year colonial expansion and genocide in the Americas. So what you’re seeing is really a compressed version of that today, and it has all the extermination and brutality and really othering of people that was the basis of the kind of global capitalism that we see today. So in a way it’s not really a surprise that this is where we have ended up, because this is how a lot of it really started.” Ghosh warns that “the rules based international order doesn’t exist anymore, it’s been blown up…the only rules that still remain are the rules for finance…and they too are increasingly unable to cope with the multiple and cascading crises that we’re seeing.”

“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?… Israel is right now in the grips of a nuclear-armed colonial revenge frenzy in the lineage of earlier colonial punitive expeditions, ones that also used art and collective sorrow as potent weapons of annihilation.⁠⁠ Identifying these deep historical throughlines – what the UCLA Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg has termed ‘multidirectional memory’ – is work of re-membering, and it holds out our best hope of exiting what increasingly feels like an endlessly recurrent genocide loop.”

“Grassroots movements are un-earthing and naming the ways in which militarism, capitalist extraction, and imperialist expansion wreak havoc on so many lives in so many places… Everywhere we look the institutions, frameworks, and ideologies we have built are being contrasted in real time with a live-streamed genocide against which the shallow promise of international human rights instruments and philanthropic funding are no match… Philanthropy has ultimately failed to truly grapple with underlying questions of power –– and ultimately the term of liberation… We have as a sector reduced the political to the technical, leading with the performance of accountability whilst displacing the politics of liberation to another conversation, for another day… Do we side with those who continue to hoard power to extract profit off of human lives, or do we choose the path of the people and all those rising up to demand an end to this horror? Do we choose to usher in a world of safety, dignity, and justice for all?”

“Often, environmental activists of white European descent enter dialogue with Indigenous people seeking to learn how to avert ecological collapse, asking, ‘What can we learn from you?’… one Māori participant suggested that perhaps the more critical question is: ‘What can we learn about ourselves from our historical commitment to the genocide of Indigenous people?’ and ‘How might such reflection inform our understanding of our role in driving today’s continued and intensifying crises?’… If many of today’s crises are, in their different manifestations, crises of oppression, then transformative change will only be possible in the context of examining the origins of oppression and the urge to dominate.”

“People from all corners of the world are being invited to learn about and mobilize for Palestine, which is a historical turning point and significant narrative change in the long struggle to end apartheid and occupation in this region… Campaigning for government policy change can only go so far when powerful interests are vested and weapons companies are profiting from genocide; this is a moment where a return to direct action and grassroots organizing is having much more impact. Palestine is a litmus test for humanity, and an open invitation for all of us who claim to care about human rights and social justice: how are we getting involved and organized to end this genocide today?”

The final post in the series exploring “the pillars of global capitalism” that are “oppressing the many for the benefit of the few” which “have recently been brought to the forefront of popular consciousness through the ongoing genocide in Gaza.” They offer straightforward clarity, as “It can be difficult to understand what these systems actually are and how they relate to each other… A strong analysis of these systems is essential for developing revolutionary organising strategies.” See the full brief: ‘Defining Imperialism, Colonialism, and Neo-Colonialism’.

“This series of speculative fiction invites us to envision and craft the world we dream about. It champions the transformative power of active and radical imagination in creation, it encourages us to lay the foundations for a future that we want our children to have – a future shaped by love, strength in community, empowering narratives and the dissolution of systemic oppression through a collective realisation that it no longe has a place in our world”.