COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
I want to share a writer’s journey — of living and writing through the Genocide. Where I live and how I live could not be further from the horror playing out in Gaza and, increasingly, on the West Bank.
Yet, because my country provides military, intelligence and diplomatic support to Israel and the US, I feel compelled to answer the call to support Palestine by doing the one thing I know best: writing.
I live in a paradise that supports genocide
I am one of the blessed of the earth. I’m surrounded by similarly fortunate people. I live in a heart-stoppingly beautiful bay.
Even in winter I swim in the marine reserve across the road from our house. Seals, Orca, all sorts of fish, octopus, penguins and countless other marine life so often draw me from my desk towards the rocky shore. My home is on the Wild South Coast of Wellington. Every few days our local Whatsapp group fires a message, for example: “Big pod of dolphins heading into the bay!”
I live in Aotearoa New Zealand, a country that, in the main, is yawning its way through a genocide and this causes me daily frustration and pain. It drives me back to the keyboard.
I am surrounded by good friends and suffer no fears for my security. I am materially comfortable and well-fed. I love being a writer. Who could ask for more?
I write, on average, a 1200-word article per week. It’s a seven days a week task and most of my writing time is spent reading, scouring news sites from around the world, note-taking, fact-checking, fretting, talking to people and thinking about the story that will emerge, always so different from my starting concept.
I’m in regular contact with historians, ex-diplomats, geopolitical analysts, writers and activists from around the world and count myself fortunate to know these exceptional people.
This article is different, simpler; it is personal — one person’s experience of writing from the far periphery of the conflict.
I don’t want to live in a country that turns a blind or a sleep-laden eye to one of the great crimes against humanity. I have come to the hurtful realisation that I have a very different worldview from most people I know and from most people I thought I knew.
Fortunately, I have old friends who share in this struggle and I have made many new friends here in New Zealand and across the world who follow their own burning hearts and work every day to challenge the role our governments play in supporting Israel to destroy the lives of millions of innocent people. To me, these people — and above all the Palestinian people in their steadfast resistance — are the heroes who fuel my life.
Writing is fighting
Most of us have multiple demands on our time; three of my good writer friends are grappling with cancer, another lost his job for challenging the official line and now must work long hours in a menial day job to keep the family afloat. Despite these challenges they all head to the keyboard to continue the struggle. Writing is fighting.
There’s so little we can all do but, as Māori people say: “ahakoa he iti, he pounamu” – it may only be a little but every bit counts, every bit is as precious as jade.
That sentiment is how movements for change have been built – anti-Vietnam war, anti-nuclear, anti-Apartheid — all of them pro-humanity, all of them about standing with the victims not with the oppressors, nor on the sideline muttering platitudes and excuses. As another writer said: “Washing one’s hands of the struggle between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” (Paolo Friere) Back to the keyboard.
My life until October 7th was more focussed on environmental issues, community organisation and water politics. I had ceased being “a writer” years ago.
One day in October 2023 I was in the kitchen, ranting about what was being done to the Palestinians and what was obviously about to be done to the Palestinians: genocide. My emotions were high because I had had a deeply unpleasant exchange with a good friend of mine on the golf course (yes, I play golf). He told me that the people of Gaza deserved to be collectively punished for the Hamas attack of October 7th.
I had angrily shot back at him, correctly but not diplomatically, that this put him shoulder-to-shoulder with the Nazis and all those who imposed collective punishment on civilian populations. My wife, to her credit, had heard enough: “Get upstairs and write an article! You have to start writing!”
It changed my life. She was right, of course. Impotent rage and parlour-room speeches achieve nothing. Writing is fighting.
’40 beheaded babies survived the Hamas attack’
My first article “40 Beheaded Babies Survived the Hamas Attack” was a warning drawn from history about narratives and what the Americans and Israelis were really softening the ground for. Since then I have had about 70 articles published, all in Australia and New Zealand, some in China, the USA, throughout Asia Pacific, Europe and on all sorts of email databases, including those sent out by the exemplary Ambassador Chas Freeman in the US and another by my good friend and human rights lawyer J V Whitbeck in Paris.
All my articles are on my own site solidarity.co.nz.
As with historians, part of a writer’s job is to spot patterns and recurrent themes in stories, to detect lies and expose deeper agendas in the official narratives. The mainstream media is surprisingly bad at this. Or chooses to be.
Just like the Incubator Babies story in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in Vietnam, reaching right back to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana in 1898, propaganda is often used as a prelude to atrocities. The blizzard of lies after October 7th were designed to be-monster the Palestinians and prepare the ground for what would obviously follow.
The narrative of beheaded babies promoted by world leaders, including President Biden, was powerfully amplified by our mainstream media; journalists at the highest level of the trade spread the lies.
I have to tell you, it was frightening in October 2023 to challenge these narratives. Every day I pored through the Israeli news site Ha’aretz for updates. Eventually the narrative fell apart — but by then the damage was done. Thousands of real babies had been murdered by the Israelis.
Never before have so many of my fellow writers been killedFollowing events in Palestine closely, it still comes as a shock when a journalist I have read, seen, heard is suddenly killed by the Israelis. This has happened several times. When it does I take a coffee and walk up the ridiculously steep track behind my house and sit high above the bay on a bench seat I built (badly).
That bench is my “top office” where I like to chew thoughts in my mind as I see the cold waves break on the brown rocks below. High up there I feel detached and better able to ask and answer the questions I need to process in my writing.
Why does our media pay little attention to the killing of so many fellow writers? Why don’t they call out the Israelis for having killed more journalists than any military machine in history? Why the silence around Israel’s “Where’s Daddy?” killing programme that has silenced so many Palestinian journalists and doctors by tracking their mobile phones and striking with a missile just when they arrive back home to their families? Why does “the world’s most moral army” commit such ugly crimes? Where’s the solidarity with our fellow journalists?
Is it because their skin is mainly dark? Is that why, according to Radio New Zealand’s own report on its Gaza coverage, New Zealanders have more in common with Israelis than we do with Palestinians? RNZ refers to this as our “proximity” to Israelis. They’re right, of course: by failing to shoulder our positive duty to act decisively against Israel and the US we show that we share values with people committing genocide.
Is this why stories about our own region — Kanaky New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands and so on, get so little coverage? I have heard many times the immense frustration of journalists I know who work on Pacific issues. The answer is simple: we have greater “proximity” to Benjamin Netanyahu than we do to the Polynesians or Melanesians in our own backyard. Really?
Such questions need answers. Back to the keyboard.
Solidarity
I try not to permit myself despair. It’s a privilege we shouldn’t allow ourselves while our government supports the genocide. Sometimes that’s hard.
There’s a photo I’ve seen of a Palestinian mother holding her daughter that haunts me. In traditional thobe, her head covered by her simple robe, she could easily be Mary, mother of Jesus. She stares straight at the camera. Her expression is hard to read. Shock? Disbelief? Wounded humanity? Blood flows from below her eyes and stains her cheek and chin. Her forehead is blackened, probably from an explosive blast. She holds her child, a girl of perhaps 10, also damaged and blackened from the Israeli attack. The child is asleep or unconscious; I can’t tell which. The mother holds her as lovingly, as poignantly, as Mary did to Jesus when he came down from the cross. La Pietà in Gaza.
Why do some of us care less about this pair? Where is our humanity that we can let this happen day after day until the last syllable of our sickening rhetoric that somehow we in the West are morally superior has been vomited out.
I’ll give the last word to another writer:
“Verily I say unto you, in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.