The Blood-Dimmed Tide

I've been trying to write something about Israel's attacks on Gaza for a couple hours now and while I have a lot to say about it, my thoughts are too angry to be able to write anything worth reading. For what it's worth, here's what I have:

• Israel has the right to exist, but it does not have the right to oppress Palestinians, steal their lands, or blockade the people of Gaza as they have been for more than a decade.
• The Hamas attack was entirely predictable given Israel's actions in the region. That doesn't make it Right, but acting like it happened in a vacuum is intellectually dishonest.
• I firmly believe that if there isn't enough international pressure to stop them, Israel will kill everyone in Gaza. It's a good bet that there are elements within Israel's military that have been planning for precisely this sort of situation for years and have drawn up their own "Final Solution" to their Palestinian "problem".
• Yes, I chose that phrase carefully.
• Barack Obama has written an excellent piece on this subject, worthy of the 5 minutes it'll take you to read it.

I am just so tired of all of this. The world is on fire and we're subsidising the companies with the matches in the trillions of dollars. Russia invaded Ukraine and is targetting the civilian population, and now Israel is doing their best to kill as many Palestinians as they can before someone steps in with a sense of mercy. My home country is stealing indigenous land to build a pipeline, and the country I'm living in is opening a new oil field. The only tools I have in my arsenal to fight any of this are waving a sign at a protest or donating some money to people who help the victims or just wave signs at other protests.

I feel powerless to stop any of the insanity in this world, but I think the most frustrating thing is that so much of this is objectively insane. How many civilians need to die in these wars? How many hectares of this planet have to be rendered uninhabitable before we just stop this madness? Why The Fuck are we even doing any of this, and what else can I do to stop it?

I don't have any answers here. I imagine that a year or so from now the list above will be longer with no new solutions.

For what it's worth, the Canadian government is matching donations for humanitarian aid in Gaza. It's one of the options I had open to me, so I sent some money. Maybe you can too.