I have spent the last three weeks in Sydney with my three year old moko and his whanau, going for walks and bike rides, playing ball, building things, attending bath times, throwing stones in ponds, braving waves at the beach, choosing foods to eat, bouncing balloons, learning catching and batting skills, accepting challenges, language skills growing exponentially, experiencing moments of hilarity and mischief, fascinated by pee and poo, occasionally dissolving into tears at a knock, and occasionally experiencing moments of deep pondering – you know the score and the joy of life for a three year old.

In which context, the horror of Gaza is inconceivable. Yet, what do you call them?: thugs, fascists, brutes, liars, manipulators, colonists, collaborators, are conceiving this horror on a daily basis. They are the embodiment of evil – and I don’t use the word lightly. Often there is a psycho analytic excuse for the murderer – a childhood trauma of intensity, but these people don’t have that excuse. They embody what has been called the banality of evil, the everydayness of the death camp. And as for the collaborators, the excusers, the US officials, that empty eyed UN ambassador, that tottering President… contempt is the singular badge for these people.

Occasionally the three year old would take pleasure in knocking over a sand castle or a construction, would throw the miniature baby toy out of the bath with a maniacal cackle and I would think that dictators probably operate at the level of three year olds. But the three year old is also rapidly learning empathy.

But not Israel. Israel has become a state embodying evil and thankfully more and more people and states are acknowledging this reality, bar some distressed religiously confused souls, some cultural pretenders like Bob Marley’s son; and of course the courtiers – the mouthers of platitudes and the dead-eyed Dicks of the talk shows.

But there is as well, the indifferent, too busy with their three year olds and the washing and the mortgage.

And there are the arms and oil sellers, busy with their profits. Perhaps these are the most contemptible. For, if Israel were denied arms and oil, the war would stop tomorrow.

And what are we learning from this crisis?  I would repeat the sentiments of some Canadian activists:

We have to admit the crisis and realise that all the crises are connected. Rather than put our energy and tolerance of risk into surviving individually within a decaying capitalist system, let us put our energy into and take the risk of establishing relationships of solidarity.

And then they pose a set of questions:

  • Given unstable incomes, unstable housing and an unknown future how do we organise?
  • Can we organise without money, space, stability and experts?
  • Do we trust ourselves?
  • In the dark age of data collection, control by algorithm and the neuro-hacking of social media, can we disentangle our nervous systems from the habits of capitalism ?
  • Have we the courage to be disobedient in terms of energy and time?
  • Can we look at wishes not problems?
  • Can we understand that difference and change are our greatest powers?
  • Can we understand that reciprocity is complex and that post capitalist reciprocation looks different? (By this they mean that relationships of gift and reception, work and payment are not simply binary.)
  • Let us understand that what we are doing and making is done and made by workers, for the community.
  • Whatever we do has to be such that it cannot be colonised by google, has to outlast capitalism and doesn’t replace the government’s work.
  • Radical change is no longer about a singular confrontation or revolution, but rather a complex integration of multiple responses operating in a precarious manner – indigenous, gender, worker, hunter and gatherer, sexual orientation, national, ability, age, environmental, with often the conflict being between this diversity and the imposers of regularity.