Gaza Gaslights

They call it gaslighting, named of course after a 1944 movie in which the villain tries to drive his wife insane by calling into question her most basic observations, that of noticing a gaslight flickering on and off. It’s a favorite tool of sociopaths, that of making the prey doubt his or her senses and intellect. Do it enough to someone and that person will become quite malleable, at some point losing faith in all internal processing, looking to exterior sources (often the sociopath) to validate and verify “the truth” in a shaky world. I don’t know what they called the technique before the movie, or before the term sociopath was coined, for that matter. I guess people just had to grunt, moan and hit their heads with sticks to convey the visceral fuckery of it all.

The Iron Dome is quite operational and has successfully intercepted incoming rockets headed for Israel from the blockaded Gaza region. The current attack on Gaza is said to be in response to these missile attacks (which seem to be largely fruitless with the Iron Dome in place, if the success rates quoted are to be believed) and also in response to the murder of 3 Israeli teens in the occupied territories. The vast majority of deaths and injuries are non-combatants, but it is said that Hamas hides with these unfortunates, presumably on beaches with kids, in bars watching World Cup Soccer, and sort of anywhere that gets bombed. Of course the Gaza Strip has 1.5 million souls packed in about 140 square miles. Yes. Hamas is nearby everyone because everyone is nearby.

If someone commits a crime and disappears in a crowd you really don’t have the moral high-ground when you attack the crowd. If my kid is at school and a murderer infiltrates the school……well, you don’t blow up the school to get the murderer. That would be….sociopathic. You probably need to go about apprehending your criminals in another manner. It’s always a thought to stop creating people who want to kill you for packing them in a hellish prison on earth. People trapped in a blockaded area with privations most of us can’t imagine. Of course the reality of it is that every bomb that hits produces so much hate, even if one member of Hamas is killed in the haystack of children, it probably isn’t going to make anyone safer. Someone will live and will remember what was done and the cycle continues. This is cold analysis, not even taking into account the loss of your own humanity through the murder of children. But now we even hear murmurs from right-wing Israeli politicians calling for extermination policy. How did they become the monsters that would believe such things?

As it spun about the planet, the International Space Station gave witness to the bombing campaign producing “the saddest photo yet”…… obvious bright spots marking the explosive carnage from space. Gaslights blinking in and out…… civilians are being bombed with overwhelming military might. But to hear the talking heads from Israel (and my own accomplice nation)–there is just no other possible solution.

What could be the real reason if this is simply creating more hatred and conditions ripe to nourish extremists (though I really don’t know that this is the correct word. It’s pretty standard to become filled with rage when you have such conditions and death hounding all aspects of your existence). I would imagine that the world is pretty terrifying right now for any of those in the Gaza Strip. If they survive this, probably more than a few will simply try to leave. Convenient exodus. Certain things happen when people get out of the way, sort of like when so many tribes perished in the Americas from first contact diseases, then later purposeful murder. As someone who could join the DAR from both sides of the family, I wish my ancestors had stayed put. I don’t feel any pride from it; you just don’t when you fully become aware of what it all means. It was a genocide and to call it anything else is disingenuous. And when these things happen, resources become available, don’t they? Things like gas fields off the Gaza coast that can make your nation an energy exporter rather than energy importer open up. All because it was necessary to bomb, even though your Iron Dome was pretty damn successful.

The first step to unraveling the lies is to know that you are being gaslighted.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest and can be reached at klwallace@riseup.net.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.