Fars Media Corporation, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”  The answer is, you’re doing it.  Right now.  

Aaron Bushnell

I don’t usually write on current political events outside of Facebook and Twitter posts, but there are limits. I will not keep my head down and my mouth shut in the face of what 15 out of 17 judges at the International Court of Justice rule is plausibly a GENOCIDE being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, with the support of the governments and major opposition parties of the two countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, of which I am a citizen.

Since January, I have posted a number of pieces on the conflict in Gaza (and its implications for civil liberties in North America and Europe) on my Substack, some of which I have subsequently revised and published in the online magazine Canadian Dimension. The fullest statement of my position (briefly, that “while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa”) can be found in the long article “Eyeless in Gaza.”

Click on the links below for full texts:

—A massacre of thoughts: the weaponization of October 7, “antisemitism,” and the ousting of Claudine Gay (Substack, Jan 8)

—Are you, or have you ever been …: the ghost of Joe McCarthy comes to Harvard Yard (Substack, Jan 10)

—Eyeless in Gaza: paratexts, contexts, and the weaponization of October 7 (Substack, Jan. 10, subsequently revised and updated and published in Canadian Dimension, Feb 9)

—An open letter to Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly: some comments on Canada’s response to the ICJ ruling on Israel (Substack, Jan 27)

—The west responds to ICJ ruling of urgent risk of genocide in Gaza by defunding key aid agency: as Mahatma Gandhi once supposedly said, western civilization would be a good idea (Substack, Jan 28)

—A clarifying moment: Canada and the ICJ ruling on genocide in Gaza. Does this mark a coup de grâce for the ‘rules-based international order’? (Canadian Dimension, Jan 30)

—Who did the ICJ Gaza ruling vindicate? An unpublished letter to the Guardian newspaper (Substack, Feb 9)

—The time of monsters: 1.4 million starving Palestinian refugees await the Israeli assault on Rafah (Substack, Feb 12)

—Over the top? Does the Super Bowl Massacre mark a turning-point in western support for Israel’s Gaza war? (Substack, Feb 15)

—Is the tide turning on Israel? Western leaders seem finally to be waking up to the monstrosity of the horrors Israel has unleashed upon Gaza (Canadian Dimension, Feb 21)

—An extreme act of protest: Aaron Bushnell, Jan Palach, and resisting the normalization of the unthinkable (Substack, March 1; slightly revised version in Canadian Dimension, March 3; Czech translation in Britské listy, March 5)