“I suffer a phobia called hope.” — Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
The Optics of Silence
Last night the ABC broadcast what could only be described as our democracy’s parody of a bad home movie; static cameras, deferential hosts, and a stage-managed spectacle of futility.
Donald Trump, the one-man wrecking ball of post-truth politics, lumbered onto our screens to promote yet another “peace plan”; a grotesque parody of diplomacy choreographed for prime time. His “address” to Israel’s Knesset was not so much statesmanship as kabuki: a rogue’s theatre where policy is replaced by performance, and reality by ratings.
Commentators traded tweets, not insights. Cameras lingered on an over-long red carpet an echo of the Trump tie and motorcades as if bearing witness to history, not farce. The tacky props effortlessly upstaged the bad faith actors. What we were watching wasn’t news; just the vulgarity and shameless venality of a sales pitch, as real as the gilded interior, the Trump-humbuggery of the White House and his presidency itself; the normalisation of deceit.
The Roots of Violence
October 7 did not fall from the heavens like a biblical plague. It was the detonation of a pressure cooker sealed shut by seventy-five years of occupation, humiliation, and despair.
To pretend it was an act of spontaneous evil is to erase the structural cruelty that bred it; and to absolve those who benefit from that cruelty.
In Gaza, according to UN and WHO estimates, more than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s renewed assault began in October 2023; the overwhelming majority women and children. Estimates? It is certain to be many, many more. Hospitals flattened. Refugee camps erased. Families erased from civil records as if they had never existed.
This is not a war. It is a massacre with a PR department.
The West Bank, meanwhile, has become a settlers’ playground: armed expansion masquerading as divine right, violence rebranded as “security.” The Gaza Strip; that tiny, besieged sliver; has been turned into a laboratory for destruction, where each bomb becomes an experiment and every corpse a data point in the obscenity of “war” against unarmed civilians.
Naming the Complicity
Chris Hedges, in his Pearls & Irritations essay, calls Gaza “the mirror in which Western civilisation sees its moral bankruptcy.” He reminds us that the horrors of October 7 are not the beginning of the story, but the middle act of a tragedy rehearsed for generations.
Western media, Hedges argues, has mastered the art of selective outrage; treating Palestinian death as background noise, the white hum of perpetual suffering. The silence of those who claim to lead the free world has never been so deafening.
George Carlin once quipped, “They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Replace “American” with “foreign policy” and you have the credo of the West’s unflinching alliance with Israel. Euphemism does the rest: “targeted strikes” for obliteration; “security fence” for apartheid wall; “collateral damage” for children burned alive.
Robert Reich has long described the neoliberal project as moral bankruptcy masquerading as efficiency. Gaza is that metaphor made flesh, hundreds of billions in military aid to Israel since 1948, while children starve in ruins. Genocide has become not only policy but business model.
The Artists Who Refuse to Look Away
The Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, in her searing piece I Suffer a Phobia Called Hope, captures the psychic dissonance of survival:
“Hope makes us bake bread when there’s no flour,
makes us sing lullabies louder than the drones.”
It is the paradox of endurance; the human refusal to vanish.
Her words echo Mahmoud Darwish’s haunting confession: “We suffer from an incurable malady: hope.” In Gaza today, that hope is a dangerous drug; an addiction that keeps a people alive even as the world conspires to erase them.
Art, as ever, remains testimony. Banksy’s murals in Rafah. Ai Weiwei’s installations. Roger Waters and Susan Abulhawa, risking public exile to name the unspeakable. Each act of witness insists: silence is complicity; truth is the last resistance.
The Spectacle and Its Spectators
Guy Debord warned that modern life would become a performance in which truth is drowned by images. Gaza is the final proof. Genocide, now live-streamed: drone footage, hashtags, sanitised infographics. The media narrates atrocity as if calling a football match. The world scrolls, shares, forgets. We are the spectators. Ghoulish voyeurs.
Our moral paralysis is their alibi.
The Reckoning
The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice are finally stirring from their torpor. Arrest warrants have been drafted, investigations reopened, evidence submitted. Yet justice delayed is justice denied, and the bombs continue to fall faster than the paperwork.
2025 may yet be remembered as the year Israel’s impunity began to crack; or as the year the world proved that law, without courage, is just paperwork.
Hedges calls it “the last act of moral disarmament.” He is right.
Every Single Child
A child is not collateral.
Not a statistic.
Not a shadow in a drone’s crosshair.
A child is a pulse, a promise, a question we must answer.
If we cannot protect every single child,
we are not civilised.
If we cannot mourn every single child,
we are not human.
If we cannot speak for every single child,
we do not deserve speech.
The Plan That Sells Peace by the Square Metre
Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” unveiled with laboured fanfare beside Netanyahu, was neither peace nor plan. It was a slick white-shoe developer’s brochure disguised as diplomacy; “a beautiful strip of land,” as Kushner once mused, “inhabited by the wrong people.”
The proposal, rejected by every serious Palestinian representative, promised “reconstruction” without sovereignty, “disarmament” without dignity, and “normalisation” without justice. In essence: surrender repackaged as salvation.
This is not peace. It is pacification. Not rebuilding, but rebranding.
The Palestinian Authority nodded politely, desperate for relevance. Hamas rejected it outright. Israel smiled and kept the bulldozers idling. As Middle East Eye puts it: “A disaster for Palestinians.” The plan launders atrocity through Orwellian double-speak: “security” for siege, “stability” for subjugation, “rebirth” for recolonisation.
Hope as Refusal
And yet, amid the rubble, people still live. Teach. Write. Paint. Sing.
They are the proof that hope is not sentimental optimism but strategic defiance. It is the will to endure, the refusal to disappear.
The people of Gaza are not ruins; they are witnesses. Their survival is the indictment.
History will not be written by the powerful alone. It will be written by those who endured; by the poets, the mothers, the teachers, the children; who believed, even in the ruins, that justice was not fantasy but future.
The story is not over. Not yet.
Coda:
Urban Wronski Writes 
Another excellent summation of the awful facts of the matter, Urban. I wonder if anyone’s taking bets on how long it’ll take for Netanyahu to declare Hamas has failed to keep its side of the ‘agreement ‘, thereby providing the supposed justification for a resumption of the genocide; the clearances of whatever is deemed necessary for the establishment of Netanyahu’s ‘greater Israel’. It’s what they’ve always intended from the start. And tRump’s mob wants its share of the real estate spoils. It ain’t over at all, by a long shot.
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So true, llama. Thanks, as ever, for reading so closely and for your sharp eye. You’re absolutely right; the choreography seems preordained. Netanyahu’s “agreement” feels less like a step toward peace than a pause to reload; a strategic intermission before Act Two of the same grim theatre. The settlers’ maps haven’t changed, nor have the ambitions of those in Washington and Mar-a-Lago who see Gaza as prime beachfront property.
“Ceasefire” has become one of those Orwellian words — like “security fence” or “targeted strike” — meaning its opposite. And as you say, this tragedy’s third act is already being written by the same men who profit most from perpetual war and permanent displacement.
It isn’t over, indeed. Only the pretence of diplomacy has begun again.
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David, your fearless observations, especially where you say this, are most incisive, as usual!
“October 7 did not fall from the heavens like a biblical plague. It was the detonation of a pressure cooker sealed shut by seventy-five years of occupation, humiliation, and despair.”
I suspect that Israel evilly set up October 7th from the very beginning, but did not know how much continuous torment Palestinians could endure before the desired violent rebellion erupted.
Israel’s evil aim was to wilfully provoke a deadly response from a peaceful people in order to justify what it had maliciously planned, namely sufficient cause for it to attack Palestine with the world’s approval.
But then, seeing how well this deception worked, it ‘went the whole hog’ with the deliberate intention of achieving the extinction of a people and their structures that we’ve so passively seen.
But the placidity of ‘humanity’ in looking on, then looking the other way, is surely cause for extreme concern.
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All the time the “Free World” panders to Trump, things will only get worse, I’d suggest we all ignore him and hope he goes away.
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Hello Jonangel,
The main problem for the world is that nearly half the American voting population is ignorant – and consequently close to stupid.
It has been deliberately made that way by innumerable ruthless capitalist exploiters who know that ignorant stupid boofheads are so easy to fool!
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I wouldn’t declare the American voters to be “stupid”, but I do think they are misinformed and for that I blame our own Mr Murdoch. Sadly, the man is still misinforming the Australian public!!!
I still firmly believe America;s problems go all the way back to the civil war, the outcome of which they have never come to terms with. Add to this the fact that there is still a disrespect for all Americans of other than European origin.
America’s downfall is three fold, religion, colour and money, but hala lu ya, Trump is going to make America great again, so hang on.
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