Colin Sheridan: A letter to all my friends who tell me to feel happy

Palestinians gather at the site of an Israeli strike in the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Hospital where displaced people live in tents, in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. Pictures: AP /Abdel Kareem Hana

Writing about Palestine often feels immoral, even if the purpose of that writing is to advocate and enlighten. To profit in any way off the misery of others — whether monetarily, reputationally, or even self-righteously — seems counterintuitive to that goal.

While it is despair more than self-interest that motivates many of us, there exists a heaviness that marinates every written word. That weight is dwarfed in the context of the suffering of those you hope to help, but it’s debilitating, nonetheless.

Even to be praised for sitting at a desk and raging is problematic. The abuse sits easier, probably because there is an element of truth to it. I am not a genocide scholar, nor an academic. I am not even an Arabic speaker. I am not a survivor. I am not Palestinian or Lebanese. I live in Ireland, one of the safest, whitest countries on earth.

Screaming from this remove is a bit like a billionaire lamenting poverty. With my electric vehicle (cobalt, Congo) and my Nikes (Cambodia, child labour), I am absolutely part of the problem. Pissing off bigots while depriving myself of Starbucks and McDonalds is hardly a sacrifice. It’s a blessing.

Palestinians try to extinguish fire caused by an Israeli strike that hit a tent area in the courtyard of Al Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. Picture: AP/Abdel Kareem Hana

The only solace is this: thanks to my employers, I have a platform. That platform could be used for many things. Writing about a genocide — the most pressing moral question of a lifetime — seems the most obvious thing in the world to do.

That other people do not think so confounds and depresses me. Maybe this writing — even from such a position of privilege — gives hope to a solitary Palestinian reader that we do in fact care. Maybe it makes the Irish Government feel uncomfortable. Maybe that discomfort embarrasses them into doing something. Unlikely, but it’s worth a try.

All I am certain of is that those of us who can have a moral obligation to act as surrogates for people in Palestine and Lebanon who are silenced by consequence of birth. We may be unqualified surrogates, but, in the absence of an alternative, we have no choice.

If Martin Luther King was right, if the curve of the universe is indeed long, and it trends towards justice, the day will soon come when they can speak freely for themselves without fear of death or torture. When that day arrives, people like me can go back to writing about how wonderful Cillian Murphy is. In the meantime, well, prepare to be uncomfortable.

We are all complicit

We are all complicit. To different degrees, sure, but complicit all the same. For that, we should never expect forgiveness for what we have allowed to happen in Palestine. The same is true of Sudan, Yemen, Congo and elsewhere in the Global South, but Palestine — quite literally — is the line we have drawn in the sand for ourselves, and it has now become the greatest moral question of our time.

And, on the daily evidence broadcast live into our homes, we are failing. Every day. And we should not demand or expect forgiveness from those people we have ignored to the point of obliteration. You couldn't even argue that we abandoned them, for to abandon we would need to have valued them in the first place.

Why? Because they are brown or Muslim? Because their teeth are broken from a century of abuse? Because we watch their children, forced to bathe in sewage, and deduce that they are lesser? Because they choose to resist, and the violence of that resistance repulses us, despite the very freedoms we enjoy we owe to violent, desperate resistance against an occupying, colonising power?

Whatever our reasoning, if they — the people of Palestine — survive this, we deserve nothing but their spite and contempt. For theirs is an unfathomable, yet utterly avoidable grief we will never fully comprehend, no matter our capacity for empathy.

There is another casualty, however, much less visceral, but whose wound is so profoundly infected it may well poison our children, and our children's children thereafter. It is that of our collective conscience.

It manifests itself, not among the thousands of ordinary, decent people who march on Saturdays and lobby their politicians and actively educate and advocate and boycott, but through institutional cowardice, political posturing and corporate complicity.

The result of which is a rot so profound it has caused most of us to abdicate our principles, and conveniently look away. To forget. To accept the fallacy that “it’s complicated”, or “Twas ever thus”.

Palestinians mourn their relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip at a hospital in Deir al-Balah.

If one of Israel’s calculations was that if they could prolong the slaughter long enough, people would eventually tire and shift their gaze, they have been proven correct. Familiarity breeds contempt, even if — in the case of choosing to ignore the pictures of decapitated children because of how it impacts our day — that contempt is actually for ourselves.

That’s why it is imperative Palestine never leaves our front pages. That we must continue to name the dead. Continue to expose those who murdered them. Refuse to call it a war, like it is some fair fight, when it is the flagrant genocide of a people.

What would you do, I honestly ask, if your child burned to death the night after your neighbour's child was blown to pieces, six months after your cousin's five-year-old little girl was shot 355 times? Each one murdered by ammunition fired with hateful intent by Israel, bought by America and made by Europe?

I know what I’d do.

Make no mistake, this was never about hostages or finishing Hamas, it was about erasure. Of a people, a culture and a history. Of Palestine. Of Lebanon. Of common humanity. Not by Jews. But by Israel.

Nobody likes being told what to do, but let me tell you this, if we look away, we are the problem. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, our worst sin is we have destroyed and betrayed ourselves for nothing. What is happening to their children might someday happen to ours.

There but for the grace of God go all of us, but if that dreadful day ever comes, we can never claim we didn’t know.