Have you learnt NOTHING in a year?!

The bane of performative activism

(Image: Dr Hussam Abu Sufiyen, walking to an Israeli tank having ensured all his patients were evacuated from the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital. He was the last person left.)

On Twitter and Instagram and all other tools of procrastination and toxicity - interspersed with images of the reality of mangled children and dead babies, before CIA-controlled Meta and thin-skinned Master of the World wannabe Elon Musk, removes them - are photos of healthcare professionals holding up placards with their names and asking for the safe return of Dr Hussam Abu Sufiyen.

Dr Hussam is a doctor at the Kamal Adwan Hospital. Israel eventually got hold of him to detain and torture him. They like doing that to doctors. The more famous, the better. Dr Adnan Al Bursh was famous. He was loved. He was courageous and respected. So they do what they do best. Tortured him so he couldn't walk then raped him to death.

In the West, teachers complain that they should not have to buy their students pencils. In Palestine, the job of a doctor is to protect your patients from Israeli death, evacuate them when the devils come knocking then sacrifice yourself to torture and death. And they do it without a single complaint. They walk, heads up high, to their captors. I swear, if you have not yet left your racist Hollywood stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs by now, you are beyond help.

But here’s the thing. We know that the more you ask Israel not to do something, the more they'll do it. We KNOW this. The more the world begs them to stop killing children, the more they stick up TikTok videos of them snipering children in the heads and then doing a jig.

The more you ask them to have restraint, the more they will show you they have none, the more they'll show you their impunity, and the more they'll show you their power. They literally came to Europe and ran amok on European streets, beat up locals and then flew back home, just to show you that they could. If there is no consequence to their actions, they will take that action with utter malevolence and utter impunity. Why wouldn’t they? It is the rational thing to do.

What consequence will there be if they don't ‘return Dr Hussam safely?’ Nothing. So why would they return him?

Unless there's a consequence for their actions, you holding up placards saying, ‘Please stop hurting the children’ is going to do nothing but encourage them to kill more children.

The more you ask them to let aid get into Gaza, the more they'll block trucks, trash food and send in bags of sand disguised as flour.

The more you ask them to free Dr Hussam - the more they know he's known and loved and cared about - the more they'll show you what they can do to him with absolute impunity.

You KNOW this. Yet you don't think, you continue this performative activism which does nothing and has done nothing. Why do you think Elon and Meta haven't blocked these posts? Because they know they don't do anything. They actually seem to promote performative activism which yields no results. Now you're aware of it, check your algorithms, and see the pattern. The more individualist the act, the more they promote it. They make it seem like people are doing something for Palestine, but in fact they do nothing but stroke their egos by pretending they are doing something for Palestine. I mean, the stupidity of holding a placard saying ‘I’m a Doctor. Let Dr Hussam go’ but not a placard asking for them not to have killed his kid, or not to have emptied the hospital, stripped staff including women, assaulted them and paraded them in the street. Maybe it's a good thing their selective humanity concentrated on the doctor in a sick way - it means Israeli torture squads may go easier on the ‘nobodies’ who didn't get a tweet.

Because that is how narcissistic psychopaths work.

They are classic psychopathic narcissists, and the narcissistic tendencies of Western societies brought up on ‘influencers’ and raised by ‘celebrity’ can’t help but respond by taking all action in a self-promoting way. ‘Look at me! I'm a doctor and I stand by my colleague! I'm very good!’ For all your fancy degrees, you have not an iota of common sense. Rather than understand Israel you care more about your own position as if you have some higher authority to call for the freedom of someone because of the job you do. Who cares if you’re a doctor? What does it matter? Why does your job have to preface your call for humanity and safety of a human being? You’re literally giving the message if he wasn’t a doctor, i.e. if you didn’t feel an affinity to him due to your shared profession, you wouldn’t bother placarding. Because what about the rest of those kidnapped from Kamal Adwan? Did you even bother to find out their names? Or is this latest TikTok trend, band-waggonging performatism the extent of your humanity?

Some doctors have been freed. Will Dr Hussam be? To be honest, your purposeless gestures, that you think are action, have probably signed his death warrant. That, or they will return him in such a state he will not be recognised as a functioning human being anymore. The more you ask them not to, the more they'll show you they will. But it's all cool, getting your photo on Instagram and having a slap on the back was more important, right?

Performative activism kills and it is the bane of Palestinian existence.

Case in point: the more people campaigned for Dr Hussam, the more Israel said, ‘Dr. Hussam who? We haven't got him.’ There's an actual video of him walking straight to to IDF tanks all over the internet, but Israel gets it's kicks out of this sadistic gaslighting and we make it so easy.

You will not like this, but it is true. It is the performative action with no consequence which gives Israel an opportunity to show their power. And you KNOW this. Every single time over the last 453 days of genocide that Israel has been asked to show restraint, where they have had the option to show clemency over their power to inflict death, they have chosen to kill every time. Every time this has occurred they have chosen their power over their clemency. So why would this be different? And every time you do it, it throws the people of the world into even more despair, even more helplessness, even more hopelessness. It’s all by design and you've handed them the psychops on a plate.

It’s time we stop self-centred activism, and actually engage in activism that deals with the issues at hand. Like the BDS movement - boycotting products yields real results. Like Palestine Action - blocking arms factories yields real results. Because these actions provide real, tangible consequences. I.e. if you don’t stop investing in Israel, we won’t buy from you and the consequence is you will lose money. Or, if you continue to contract with the Israeli weapons supplier, Elbit, we will keep taking action against your business until you stop, obstructing you from conducting your business and resulting in you losing money. These are real actions with real consequences, not just self-promoting empty gestures. In fact, the identities of the majority of these activists are never known.

Last year we marched and raised awareness. This year we need to grow up and learn from the lessons Israel has actually taught us.

After a year of genocide, we still act like Israel is reasonable and will read our little signs and stop killing people.

And after a year we have not learned that it is not Israel who acts irrationally, but it is we who are the irrational ones. After a year, we have not even grasped the basic lesson in all activism: Know your enemy.

Israel acts rationally. Yes, completely evil, but they are rational. They calculate an action and if they think they will get away with it with relative impunity, they'll take it. They are rational because they take action they know will have no real negative consequences for them, and they make a rational decision to take that action. When they invade countries, they get away with it. When they rape people to death, they get away with it. When they shoot children, they get away with it. They take rational action - for example, mass murder - to get a result, and they get that result, e.g. the ethnic cleansing of Gaza; the annexation of Syrian land; the unilateral ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon.

We are irrational. We take action we know will have no consequence. We keep acting in the same ways which do not yield results. We actually keep going down the same road following patterns that even lead to negative results. But we don't change our patterns to do anything differently. In fact, we are so self-absorbed, that even when we know that an action may harm the Palestinians, we still do it.

For example, we have been told for months that it is likely that WhatsApp is helping the Israeli army to target Palestinians and murder them. Yet we still use WhatsApp. And we use it to talk about Palestinians! We have so little care to move from comfort-zone, performative activism, that we haven’t even bothered to exercise caution over WhatsApp in the knowledge of the very real risk that it may be being used as a tool in this genocide. It's completely irrational. But we keep doing it. We are completely irrational.

We are so irrational, we cheer at the words of Western institutions and Western leaders before we understand what's actually being said and what's actually being done. These institutions and people are also engaged in superficial performances that our performance-riddled minds see as real. The ICC arrest warrants are meaningless in the Western world: a performance. The Hague cannot hold a trial for Netanyahu because his pals won’t arrest him and the US has a law to invade the country should they try: the whole thing is a performance. The ICJ - the ‘world court’ may have ordered Israel to stop its genocidal acts, but it hasn’t because there are no consequences to follow the ICJ’s words: the whole court is just a performance. The UN writes reports and hand-wrings about ‘war crimes’ and ‘it looks like genocide’ and yet has enacted no peacekeeping force, and has allowed Netanyahu and his ilk to continue to come to their HQ and lecture them: performance. UN special rapporteurs go around the world giving speeches about how terrible it all is - as if our eyes cannot see it for ourselves - and then get a standing ovation for words we all already know, without engaging in any action to stop the genocide - performance. Ireland is clapped and cheered for stopping arms to Israel and speaking up about the depravity of their genocide with righteous condemnation, while at the same time massively increasing their ‘dual-use’ exports to the Zionist state, and not refusing a single license. Dual-use is any item that can also be used as a weapon. Chemicals - like white phosphorus - fall into this. The Irish government even admitted they couldn’t restrict trade with Israeli settlements in Palestine, because their hands were tied by the EU. But their strongly worded tirades are enough for people to claim they are a great Western nation standing up to Israel. They don't even smell the bullshit*t performance. That's all that matters, the performance.

And we react to these performances with our own vacuous performances. The whole Western world is engaged faux, superficial fakery while half the world burns in World War III, not labelled as such because white people in Western Europe aren’t dying, yet.

Performance after performance and performance. Meaningless.

It's a massive psychops game. On the one hand, Western governments want to silence pro-Palestinian voices. On the other, they also want to distract them. Ban a few speakers from the country or arrest them, and you have a whole load of people distracted by it and waving flags outside a police station instead of taking any real action for Palestine, for example through civil disobedience or stopping the corporate machine in its tracks by refusing to work. No one is willing to do the latter, though it's arguably the single most powerful and effective thing to stop the war machine which is powered by our states who are beholden to corporate interests completely. The US president is always bought - AIPAC, usually their biggest sponsor - and the UK PM was literally on the Trilateral Commission which promotes cooperate ownership of the world. He's already been in talks with BlackRock to ‘invest’ in the UK, less than 6 months into the job. Do you get it yet?

Performance activism is killing actual human autonomy where the autonomous human thinks shouting and putting their face on Instagram with a placard or flag, is activism. It isn't, it's just a selfie. Our autonomy is taken up by the performative and the performative has made us lemmings.

We need to do better. We need to drop the act, the performance, and actually engage in meaningful acts of consequence, not acts of self-congratulation. We need to actually think about Palestinian’s lives rather than Palestinian lives, a monolith we either support or don't as if it’s a football match, complete with placard and flags.

This year every person in Gaza will be dead.

But at least we used a Sharpie on a piece of card and waved a flag for an Instagram post.