Artwork by Olly Costello

“#Humanity wake up!,” wrote Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in a recent post on X/Twitter. Triggering such urgency is her concern that Israel’s genocide in Gaza and oppression of Palestinians are being normalized. Mondoweiss reporter Philip Weiss voiced that same concern in his July 7 Weekly Briefing: Normalizing Genocide. 

Western media is no longer paying sustained attention. Israel’s genocide on Gaza – the killings, the injuries, the forced famine, the displacements upon displacements, the wanton destruction of essential services -- is becoming ‘old news.’ Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing land grabs, raids, unleashed settler violence, and brutal repression of Palestinians in the West Bank, including torture of Palestinian detainees, is rarely on the Western media’s radar, if at all. As Francesca Albanese points out, this “does not mean that genocide and oppression have stopped. It means they are being normalised.” Israel’s escalating military attacks in Gaza City compelled the closing, announced just yesterday, of the Al Ahli Arab Anglican Hospital, one of the UCC’s global partners. There is nothing normal about that. 

It's been nine months since October 7^th. Who would have predicted, much less imagined, the duration of this horror, a genocide being carried out, not even in the dark, but in plain sight? And yet Israel’s genocide continues, in defiance of

international law and with full-on U.S. defense funding and weapons. 

There is good reason for Francesca Albanese’s alarm and wake up call. It’s not only the media, but as people go about the daily rounds of their lives, they too become otherwise occupied and can stop paying close attention. It is said that the opposite of love is not hatred, but apathy, or to use Elie Wiesel’s term, “indifference.” I am confident that no one reading this newsletter is apathetic or indifferent. The risk for us is not apathy (although we often are encountering that and/or ignorance in others). The risk for us is more likely to be a kind of numbing.

Paying close attention to the horrors of Israel’s daily assault on and slaughter of Palestinians takes an emotional toll and can create a kind of secondary trauma. Feelings of grief or outrage or both together can become overwhelming, even paralyzing.

That’s when I, and I expect all of us, recognize the need to prioritize self-care and focus on balms to heal, or at least console, our heartbreak and soul ache. 

It is crucial that we allow ourselves some respite, times of deep breathing, deep grieving, and deep sharing, especially in communities of resistance and solidarity and faith. The support of such communities -- the UCC PIN steering committee

is one for me – is a balm to the soul, offering an antidote to the risk of numbing, inspiration for organizing, courage for prophetic witness, and energy for persistent resistance.

A current way that UCC PIN is persisting in our resistance is through our adamancy about naming and calling out Israel’s genocide and our refusal to normalize it. To that end, we are

continuing to promote our statement, It's Past Time: Naming Israel's Genocide in Gaza, urging religious and political leaders to use the language of genocide. We are grateful to both the Apartheid-Free Congregations/Communities and the AFSC Action Hour for sharing our statement with their networks. We applaud the Unitarian Universalists for leading the way as a denomination in adopting the language of genocide at their recent General Assembly where 74.8% of the delegates passed Action of Immediate Witness: Solidarity with Palestine. You will find in this month’s Breaking the Stories a newly introduced section listing Podcasts and a section dedicated to articles and resources specific to genocide. Please draw on them as you join us in the work of naming Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“There can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness,” observed Albert Camus. May we be clearsighted in recognizing, naming, calling out, and seeking to end Israel’s genocide.

This is a section of the UCCPIN July 2024 E-Newsletter. To read the entire newsletter, follow this link.