The Neck and the Sword - This is what genocide looks like - and too bad if it makes you uncomfortable to think about it

Despite, or maybe because of, the focus of the Western news media switching considerably away from Gaza in recent weeks, with the concentration instead on the French and British elections and the American presidential campaign, the brutality in Gaza goes on.   The last week, in particular, has seen a major increase in Palestinian deaths, with civilians massacred in 'safe areas'.    Large masses of people continue to be moved around the Strip by IDF fiat, moving to such 'safe areas' which then become free fire zones just like anywhere else.    The Irish political class - with the Oireachtas now on its summer recess - is no longer talking much about Palestine.    Students have gone home from university.     Protests happen, but there is no avoiding the awful contrast between the uptick in deaths in Gaza and the downtick in public agitation.   At least that's how it seems in Dublin.

Here is some reading to keep us all up to date and to bring us the 'bigger picture'.   Rashid Khalidi, whose superb work has often been referenced on this blog, has a long and impressive interview (conducted by the redoubtable Tariq Ali) in the current New Left Review:

Rashid Khalidi

And the courageous Israeli historian, Amos Goldberg, at Jacobin

Israeli Historian: This Is Exactly What Genocide Looks Like

And here is a tremendous blog piece by my redoubtable comrade and colleague, Ronit Lentin.   Ronit has been a pioneer in the study of racism in Ireland, but she's also a brave and steely writer and campaigner on the question of Palestine.   Here, riffing on Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest, she meditates on the way that some people are made 'uncomfortable' by the insistence that activists make that 'Palestine is still the question', and what this desire for 'comfort' means.

The zone of (dis)comfort

Conor