We are entering the final phase of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza. The Final Solution. And it is all made possible by the United States and other Western nations who have supported and assisted the apartheid state in its genocidal campaign from the very beginning.

Thousands of children are now at the brink of death from starvation. People are fainting in the street. Dying from malnutrition. Scores of civilians are being gunned down or blown up as they desperately seek food from supposed “humanitarian aid centres.” In truth, these centres are death traps laid out by the Israelis and the Americans.

I have witnessed some horrendous crimes perpetrated by the United States and the West in my lifetime. The war against Iraq, a country that never attacked it. The destruction of Libya, which has never recovered. But these past 21 months have been something far worse. An evil even I have trouble wrapping my head around.

But with all of these mounting atrocities, the silence has grown too. And silence is a pernicious sort of complicity. I am reminded of what German playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht once said:

“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”

Is this where we are at now? Those of us bearing witness to such feats of barbarism? Trudging through our daily lives, forcing smiles, forcing bites of food, drinking too much, drinking too little, sleeping too much, sleeping too little? Prattling off small talk while we hush the sounds of children crying and blot out the images of crushed bodies, limbs on dusty streets, skeletal babies. But damned to watch it all and repeat it for anyone who will listen? Desperately hoping it will all stop, if not for the people of Gaza, then for us. For our own sanity?

We all know, on some level, that none of us will ever be the same. The cheerleader, the apathetic, the witness, even the perpetrator. None of us can be the same because such crimes have a way of altering the very fabric of our being. Warping our social DNA. Mutilating our connections to each other. We may not recognize it at first. Some of us never will. But we are a different people than we were 21 months ago. A society of the damned.

As the Final Solution is finalized, so are we. A new form. And I will admit, what that will look like fills me with a terror I am quite unfamiliar with.

Kenn Orphan, July 2025

*photo is what is left of Beit Hanoun.