It's really incredibly brutal.

I know beyond a certain point it's just splitting hairs and that comparisons like this quickly become odious but people were horrified by the images and stories that came out of the Abu Ghraib prison incident, yet what the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan pales in comparison to what Israel has done to Palestinians in terms of scale, duration, and severity.

Israel is perpetrating something like a modern day version near to what was perpetrated by colonial empires in the Belgian Congo or German South West Africa of the past and meanwhile the world has largely been complacent while the bourgeois democracies in the west (and often beyond) have been complicit in the atrocities committed by Israel.

Careful staring too long into that abyss, comrade. At some point you risk going beyond outrage and slipping into despair and hopelessness. Palestinians need active, vocal supporters who are willing to take to the streets and demand change not heartbroken doomers who are so depressed that they can barely manage to get out of bed to feed themselves. There's a threshold that you'll reach when you have been exposed to enough that you become jaded and nothing that you hear about Israel will surprise you anymore. That's a good time to check out from the news cycle and to throw yourself into activism, organising and study. You should give yourself permission to take a break from it as soon as it starts feeling like it's too much for your heart to bear.

(No shame to my depressed doomer comrades though. I have boundless compassion for all of you - you are doing your best and every day you survive is a testament to your resilience and a big "fuck you" to this shitty world. Lenin, for all his foresight, never thought he would live to see the revolution and I bet you don't believe that you'll ever live to see the end of Israel or capitalism but always remember - history has a habit of making fools out of anyone who believes in the certainty of the present order of things continuing on indefinitely.

"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings"
— Ursula LeGuin)