The following is Part 2 of a talk given by the author to a meeting of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) on April 24 in Philadelphia. (Trigger warning due to graphic descriptions of rape and torture.)

At some point, the boundaries are pushed too far. As a historic example, we saw a hint of this in the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s that spurred an end [to] America’s slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia; and the moral force of Black people rising together in their pain and rage against legislated racism changed the social fabric of America, ending formal segregation and ushering a new era in the struggle against institutional racialism.

Power did then what it is doing now, deploying brute force, murder, intimidation, silencing, marginalizing, surveillance, all manner of corrupt policing and today deportations, secret evidence and the shredding of due process.

We see the outcome of these historic moments, and we think we know it. Labels like “victory” and “advancement” are applied. “Civil rights” is a term spoken as an absolute, a singular point of history with a terrible before and liberated after.

It’s that “happy ending” reframing and rebranding that the ruling oligarchs and elites depend on in order to return to the consolidation of power.

They need this kind of narrative construction that manipulates public imagination with platitudes and reversible concessions, followed by a rebranding of oppression. For example, enslavement becomes mass incarceration and purposeful drug addiction.

We see today such a perversion of truth by a complicit corporate media that turns victims into villains and war criminals into sympathetic characters. It is a real time demonstration of how power had adapted since the 1960s and 1970s, creating new stops, levers, gates and gatekeepers. They lulled us back into their system, rebooted it with greater cruelty and corruption and retooled it with new distractions, celebrity worship, depoliticized sports mania, contrived threats of immigrants and a minimum wage that forces the working poor to work so long that it shortens their lifespans, all while they concentrated more and more power in the hands of a tiny minority.

They bought politicians, who in turn work to safeguard and increase the wealth and influence of this elite minority, through various tax loopholes, deregulations and privatization of public institutions and all manner of legislations that turned millionaires into billionaires, with the first trillionaires on the horizon. A staggering wealth gap built on the misery of the masses both here and abroad. They created laws to exonerate their criminality and laws to criminalize our dissent. They busted up the unions, subjugated workers and pitted them against each other. Instead of confronting the bosses, workers were manipulated into demanding iron borders and separation of families at those borders.

They scrapped environmental regulations and wildlife protections to continue extraction while polluting and decimating the planet. The deregulations allowed this tiny minority to buy up the airwaves, so now they dictate our own thoughts and our own imagination, as they control the content of 95% of everything we see, hear and read in the way of mainstream journalism, entertainment, education and cultural productions.

Al Jazeera has been a rare exception, and that’s why there are currently [Israeli and U.S.] lawsuits against it, which equate telling the truth with supporting terrorists.

Hollywood, higher education serve genocidal narrative

It is no accident that terrorist characters dominate Arab depictions in Hollywood. The unusually high number of casual mentions of Israeli benevolence or Israeli genius in so many television series and films are intentional; and it’s through such management of public sentiment over decades that Palestinian humanity is shamefully trivialized or ignored in both print and broadcast news media no matter how many atrocities we face at Israel’s hands, or for how long.

This is the reason why people can watch the wholesale vandalizing of our lives without flinching, whether it’s in Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Somalia, or Lebanon. If what’s happening to Palestinians were happening to Israelis, we all know there would have been zero tolerance for a single bomb.

They also exert undo control on the academy. Instead of paying taxes, this elite ruling class, these billionaires “donate” to universities sufficient sums to impose their vision not only for higher education but for the acceptable expression of constitutional rights like the First Amendment. Here in Philadelphia, outraged by a Palestinian literature festival — a beautiful celebration of Palestinian excellence and indigenous heritage — the billionaires Marc Rowan, Dick Wolf and the Lauder family conspired to remove the president of the University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill for her insufficient deference to their interpretation of academic freedom.

Enlisting their hired goons in Congress, they and other billionaires of their ilk, like Bill Ackman, denigrated and/or removed two more Ivy League university presidents for the same reason. It was a message to all universities: fall in line or you’re next.

They even managed to bring the internet — which gave the 1990s generation hope for real democracy — under their nefarious control through monopolies, algorithms and various forms of surveillance and censorship, much of which is closely tied to Israel.

And now we are at the stage where exercise of the First Amendment is a criminal offense if we dare criticize Israel. They started with people on valid visas, then [went on] to legal permanent residents — kidnapping them off the streets and throwing them into prisons without charge or trial or shipping them to offshore gulags, imprisonment it seems for life with not even a single legal charge.

We are told that the next group of targets will be naturalized citizens like me, creating a process of denaturalization to strip us of citizenship. All to protect a criminal foreign state, which seems to have near total control of this country, both domestically and in foreign policy.

Thwarting resistance

We can go back to any moment in time to find examples of how we have incrementally been stripped of agency, of conscience and power. In the early 2000s, Americans tried to stop the march of U.S. corporate and Zionist warmongers toward war, but they just trampled our will and trampled the bodies of millions of Iraqis. And the world watched as the U.S. pulverized that once glorious, high-functioning ancient society, principally on behalf of Big Oil.

The way they pushed on, ignoring the will of the American people, was itself an experiment in how they would continue to “push the envelope” as it were. At the time, I recall analysts saying that Iraq finally broke the stigma of Vietnam and freed Americans to pursue militarism and imperial adventures. An “embedded” media hid the bloody horrors of that naked attack on a sovereign nation and kept the secrets of U.S. corporate looting of Iraq’s treasures and laundering of U.S. tax dollars through rebuilding schemes to line the pockets of billionaires.

Their message to us was clear: We will do what we want and you the people cannot stop us, not in your thousands, not in your millions. The lesson they meant to teach us from the utter rape of Iraq was that we are powerless. That our humanity is a liability. That our outrage, our pain, our grief are no match for their violence.

Americans absorbed that lesson well and did not bother protesting when the U.S. did the same in Libya, another naked attack on a stable and prosperous sovereign nation, an attack that caused a staggering de-development of one of Africa’s most advanced nations into a veritable market in enslaved human beings, a NATO outpost, ripe for Western looting.

And so the message that our silence sent back to them was that we are indeed desensitized, disempowered and uninterested.

The enslavement and mutilation of Congolese children and whole families in mineral mines to benefit Western tech billionaires (as well as Israel’s blood diamond industry) barely elicit a blip in Western media, a shockingly cruel reality they continue to obscure.

There are hundreds more bloody examples of American and Israeli adventures in killing and destroying others in the service of Zionism and this ruling corporate class. Mass surveillance of the populace followed the gutting and looting of public education in the United States. The rich got richer, and the poor became destitute.

In the name of technology and efficiency, capitalists degraded our food and water — poisoned them even — benefitting pharmaceutical billionaires who keep the masses teetering on the edge of health. Popular gurus pushed philosophies of individualism, contempt for family and various forms of alienation that shattered community and social or familial bonds, leaving vast swaths of the people unable to cope with life without drug varieties, both legal and illegal.

A parasitic way of life

The billionaires have weighed us down with the fake dreams they scripted for us — insurmountable debt as a stand-in for education, a white picket fence and toxic green lawns with “no trespassing” signs as a stand-in for family; blood diamonds as a stand-in for love; mindless consumption as a stand-in for quality of life; and endless carnage abroad as a stand-in for greatness. They sold us a glorious pile of shit and made us think that’s all there is. That such an unnatural and parasitic way of life was normal — even inevitable.

The capitalists glorified obsessive consumerism and obscenely ostentatious lifestyles. They have turned the world inside out, telling you that darkness is light; that war is peace; that the mass murder of children is self-defense; and the wholesale leveling of hospitals, schools and water infrastructure is normal.

They’ve taught society that the unforgivable hoarding of wealth, exploitation of people and planet and animals is to be admired and celebrated as success.

And if you question their lies, you’re marginalized as a conspiracy theorist. Regiments of politicians, talking heads, pundits, journalists and broadcasters take to the airways to convince you that you hadn’t really just seen the brains, tongues and eyeballs spilling from the crushed skulls of children. Or worse, that they somehow deserved it. They’ve made an industry of gaslighting us.

And we let them, perhaps believing it was our choice. But choice, like democracy and free press, is an American illusion, a fairytale they peddle in schools, newspapers and songs and anthems.

Look how quickly they disbanded, silenced and erased memories of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Look how we are taught to believe that change can only come through the ballot box, where we’re told to “choose” between two war criminals one election after another. Look how they are crushing and abusing students across the country for daring to speak against genocide. They are in fact crushing what little remains of this nation’s conscience.

Gaza: the graveyard of empire

This moment of livestreamed genocide is the culmination of decades of global capitalist criminality and genocidal Western and Zionist imperialism. Now in service of Israel’s holocaust, the U.S. is dismantling Lebanon, destroying Syria, pummeling Yemen, threatening Iran, arresting Americans, deporting students, suspending them, withholding their degrees, throwing the masses into a black hole of perceived impotence as we watch unimaginable horror unfurl before our eyes.

The promise of this broken system to you is this: we will not target you in return for your silence and your obedience, along with your public wealth.

The choice we have

And so you and me, all of us face the choice: do we accept such moral defeat of our souls, of our very humanity, or do we rebel?

It is not enough to protest, because protest is an allowance already built into their system. Tidy barricaded areas, fortified with robocops, where we’re allowed to scream and chant to our hearts content. It’s just a venting valve that allows the machine to function uninterrupted.

The biggest fear that the technocrats, billionaires and political stooges have is not the collapse of society. It is not our bankruptcy. It is not genocide or even the decimation of our planet. They have their bunkers and private islands.

Their biggest fears are that the principled moral voices of our time will reach your hearts and feet and wallets, enough to cause you to disrupt their machine. They fear the Mahmoud Khalils and Greta Thunbergs of the world. They fear the Francesca Albeneses and Berta Cácereses of the world. They fear the water protectors.

That is why they work overtime to destroy these individuals and push the masses to teeter on the edges of life, taking away the public wealth from education, unemployment, welfare, Social Security, health care, infrastructure and the arts — and channel them instead to weapons, surveillance, prisons, militarized police, militarized borders and endless war.

What a world. But we do not have to accept it.

Gaza is no longer the enclave sealed and besieged by Israel and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s Egypt into a concentration camp. Gaza is no longer the densely populated strip of Israeli-occupied land. It is no longer just a place, not just a decimated earth or the site of a genocide. Gaza is all the world now. Gaza is our collective moment of truth. It is the clarity we need and seek. It is the locus of humanity’s moral abyss, the definitive divide between us and the ruling elite that trample us. It is us or them. There is no middle place now. All the borders must fade, leaving us united to confront this greedy genocidal minority wherever they are.

Gaza is the most anguished place on earth at this hour, made all the more so by unimaginable Zionist cruelty, set to music for TikTok. And from this tortured place of rubble, death and misery, there springs a great hope to pull us out of the darkness in which we’ve been forced to live for so long.

If we allow the wheels of this genocidal Zionist and American engine to keep turning, there will be no more limits to fascism. There will be no shame or red lines before which they will halt. There will be no boundaries against which they’ll need to push. They will do it again, before our very eyes, like they raped Libya after demoralizing us in Iraq. Saving Gaza is our gateway to save humanity from this insatiable group of humans devouring the planet and its lifeforce. This struggle can no more be just about a ceasefire. It must demand liberation and accountability across our burning planet.

This moment of Gaza is a call to conscience. A call to action. A call to disrupt. To disobey. To become ungovernable. To risk your convenience and your comfort and your privilege. This moment is a call to ignite your moral imagination; to resist creatively and collectively.

This moment belongs to us, the people. We can dream our own dreams and create a new world in every personal act of refusal to participate in this horrible system predicated on genocide and unending exploitation. We can transform our relationship to the natural world from its current parasitic form to a symbiotic relationship.

The empire is scared. The kind of brutality and shredding of norms that we’re witnessing do not come from strength. They come in fact from weakness and insecurity before the increasingly angry masses. They have guns and police, but the true and lasting strength lies squarely with us. The sturdy moral foundations of life are squarely under us.

Compassion and defiance and numbers are our superpowers, and this moment can be our origin story. But everyone must understand that the world we need and want must and will pass through this birthing canal called Gaza, Palestine. There is no sidestepping this livestreamed holocaust. Nothing good will become of this world if we collectively allow this moment of watching daily carnage, purposeful starvation and a level of terror and destruction unprecedented in human history to pass without accountability and sustained unflinching outrage.

Gaza has been described as “a graveyard for children,” and indeed it is, as it is also a graveyard for journalists, health care workers, artists, writers, and the United Nations and other aid workers — these populations most targeted by Israel. But Gaza is also the graveyard for Western slogans and mythologies like “democracy,” “human rights” and “rule of law.”

Gaza will be the graveyard of Western hegemony and empire.

But we must act. Boldly, courageously, creatively and collectively.