I heard a phrase on YouTube recently: a moral and intellectual emergency. Yes. That’s exactly what this is.
Moral — because we watch a genocide on our phones and go back to dinner. We are told there is a ceasefire — and this week another child was killed anyway. One of four people killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza. Ceasefire is a lie powerful people tell when they want credit for stopping while the killing continues at a pace they find acceptable.
Intellectual — because the people who should know better have given up thinking. They learned that careful words buy safety. Say “genocide” and you are extreme. Say “both sides” and you are balanced — even when one side has the bombs, the army, the borders, and the backing of the biggest power on earth.
Let’s call it what it is lah. The Zionist regime in Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Despite an independent UN commission of inquiry saying so, Israel called the report distorted and false — and demanded the commission be abolished. Courts will take years. Children don’t have years.
I can’t stop thinking about colonialism. We are told that was another century. IT ISN’T. It is the same logic with better public relations: someone far away draws the lines, decides who belongs, claims the land, and treats the people already living on it as a problem to be managed. The empires said civilisation. Now they say security. Same hunger for land. New vocabulary.
Brunei lived under British protection for nearly a century. Ours was gentler than most, and I’m grateful for that. But I know what it is to have your future discussed in rooms you aren’t in, by people certain it is for your own good. Add dispossession and bombs to that — and you begin to understand what Palestinians have lived with.
None of this is about Jews. Plenty of Jewish people are saying the same thing, and louder than I can. This is about a state — and a world that lets it.