The Madness They Suffer From

The Ghosts of Israel's Future, Part IV

In 1982, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was in Beirut when the city was besieged by the Israelis. As part of his book "Memory for Forgetfulness" (ذاكرة النسيان) Darwish mentioned an acquaintance of his who could not believe that a siege was underway "unless it was written in Hebrew," and "since Israeli newspapers had not yet reached him, he wouldn't acknowledge that Beirut was under siege." 

"But this," Darwish writes, "is not a madness I suffer from."¹

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We are now over a year into Netanyahu's genocide in Gaza. As I write these words, his einsatzgruppen death squads have unleashed hell on a hospital and tents in northern Gaza as part of his ongoing plan to "liquidate" that section of the Palestinian ghetto.² As Netanyahu expands his extermination campaign to my country, Lebanon, we bear witness to this world we live in, a world in which Israel's Milošević can confidently broadcast his crimes against humanity. He can speak of turning Lebanon into Gaza because he knows that we know what this means. 

And yet, large swaths of the Western media, its politicians and its think tanks are scarcely different than the Israeli researcher that Darwish knew. They reject the reality broadcasted live to the same smartphones we all have.

They suffer from the same madness.

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