I love you Mum. My awareness of you, and my awareness of the lack of you, ebbs and flows with time. But you are always there, like the moon pulling at the tides. So what the hell is this expansion and contraction? One second is one second, right? A minute is a minute. And a year is supposed to be a year. So, how is it possible that five years have passed since the day you died? Five whole years?? I was 47 years old, but I can’t remember anything about being 47, except that’s how old I was when you died. In some ways it feels like time stopped at that moment. Except it wasn’t time at all, it was you. You stopped. Existing. In the present tense, anyway. You just froze in time. And the last message you ever sent me will always be the last message you ever sent me.
The last message.
But still, I talk to you. As if you were here. Or there. Or somewhere. Not in fully formed sentences, but more like fragmented thoughts. Like I wish, I wonder, I’m sorry, I love you. Half-formed ideas that stick in my throat, and in my heart. Because the second they start forming, I realise there’s nowhere for them to go. So they abort. They reject. They miscarry, but still, I talk to you. It hurts Mum. It really fucking hurts. But it’s OK, I let it hurt. I want it to hurt. Because hurting is better than not hurting. But sometimes the pain of missing you is so bad, that I can’t help but cry. And the crying helps, so I sob. I crumple, and I sob my fucking heart out. And the oxytocin floods my body and I feel a little bit better. But the pain doesn’t actually go away. The pain is still there, and you are still gone.
I was clueless. I didn’t know, I honestly didn’t know that I would experience it so painfully. You were so unwell, and your life seemed so stripped of joy towards the end. I had brief, guilty, cavalier thoughts that perhaps death would be a kind of blessing for you. Fuck, I actually thought that. I thought it might be better. I had no idea.
I’ve thought about you a lot over the last five years. I’ve wondered a lot of things that I will never know because you’re no longer here to tell me. I wonder what you would think if you saw your beautiful rings on my fingers. The very same rings that you wore every day, and that were a part of you. I wear them now, every day, with love and pride. Would you think it was weird to see your rings on someone else’s fingers? I wonder if I could have done more to make you feel important. I wonder how you would have coped with covid. With all the lockdowns. I wonder if you knew exactly how stunning your smile was. And I wish you knew how much I love it when people tell me I look like you. I wonder what happened that day in 2012 when you left your dirty jeans in the laundry hamper in your bedroom in the house in Greece, and then just flew back home to Melbourne for the last time. How could you know that you would never go back? That you would never see your jeans again. Or your sister. How could you know that eleven years later I would pull your jeans out, with the worst feeling of finality that I’ve ever felt in my life?
Sisters ♥
I wish I could hold your beautiful face in my hands and tell you how much I love every line, every wrinkle. Every sign of a full and spirited life. I wish I could tell you how desperately I miss you. I wish you’d known that you were so adored that your absence has created a massive black hole in my heart. I wish you could tell me how I’m supposed to go from a life enveloped by your love, to a life devoid of it? Because, when you were alive, no matter where I was I was bathed in pure and unconditional love. How do I go from that, to suddenly having it ripped away from me without any fucking warning, without any kind of preparation? I’m still grappling with that. I know that you never truly appreciated how important you were, and how much of an impact you had on people’s lives, but you were an extraordinary woman and you still are the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever known. I wish I had told you that more often. I wish I’d made sure that you knew it. That’s a regret, because I’m not sure that you did know. I’m not sure that I did convey it well enough. And now it’s too late.
I wonder about your collection of beautiful rocks and crystals, which I had to arm-wrestle Mary and Pieta for when the three of us went through all your things. I had to give up some pretty good shit for the honour of claiming them as mine. I wish I could ask you where you got them from. Each and every one seems like it must have a story behind it. I wish I knew what they meant to you.
Each one a geological marvel, each one part of my mother’s story
I wish I’d spent more time with you. I wish I’d talked to you more. I wish I had been more affectionate. I wish that we had listened to more music together. I wish we’d gotten high together. Danced together. I wish I knew the recipe for your rice pudding. I wish I had made you laugh more. I wish I hadn’t been so dismissive. I wish you could hear me speaking Greek. I’m getting so good at it, and you’d be so proud of me. I’m taking online lessons with a gorgeous woman from Piraeus called Marilena, and we’ve become such good friends. Her personality reminds me so much of you. I wonder if you knew that life is a circle. Μακάρι να μπορούσαμε οι δυο μας να κουβεντιάσουμε στα ελληνικά. I wish I’d bought you a better mobile phone. I wish that neither of us had to deal with our feelings of social anxiety alone. I wish you didn’t have to worry so much about money. I wish you’d had more joy in your life. More than anyone I’ve ever known, you deserved more joy. I wonder if you know where my purple dress is? The beautiful one I made when I took up sewing after Dad died? I can’t find it and I don’t know where it’s gone. I’m sorry that David and I had a big fight in front of you a month before you died. I’m sorry I didn’t listen when you told me what you wanted, and when you told me what you didn’t want. I’m sorry I took you for granted.
Life is a circle
I wish you’d used your mobile phone to call an ambulance when the landline wasn’t working. I wish you’d pressed your medical alert. I wish you’d gone to the neighbour’s house before sunrise. I wish you’d knocked on their door and woken them up in the middle of the night. I wish you’d bashed their door down. I’m sorry I wasn’t there in the hospital with you, with Mary and Pieta. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you died. I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to you. I wish we could have heard each other’s voices, just one more time. I wish I could have told you that I love you. I wish you’d known that I was there with you. I wish you knew that you are always here with me.
I was recently leafing through a Condé Nast Traveller magazine and came upon a page where contributors were asked to share their favourite summer holiday memories. As I sat on the toilet contemplating all the far-flung destinations my travels have taken me to, my head filled with countless pleasant memories created since David and I moved to Dubai fifteen years ago. As a lot of you know, I do not like living in Dubai so much, but I do acknowledge that residing here has given me a pretty remarkable life, full of travel and adventure and the opportunity to make friends all over the world. With a faraway look in my eye, I smiled and reminisced as I tried to settle on just one favourite sun kissed memory.
I thought of our three pilgrimages to Burning Man and in particular that one glorious morning when my friend Marya, David and I all woke up before dawn and cycled a few miles out to the trash fence in skeleton bodysuits to watch the sun rise majestically over the playa. Rubbing our sleepy eyes, we squinted at the champagne coloured clouds from which a dozen or so large black dots appeared to magically materialise.
Waiting for Daft Punk’s trash fence gig to start
As we blinked incredulously at the golden light, the dots seemed to get bigger and develop brightly coloured tails. Marya and I glanced at each other, a little alarmed. What was happening? Were we hallucinating? NO! It slowly became apparent that what we were seeing were a number of daring parachutists who had jumped out of a plane at daybreak and were now painting the sky with their rainbow coloured chutes, gracefully trailing beautiful long flags in a wondrous tapestry across the heavens. It was such a beautiful moment and I’ll never forget it, but was it my favourite summer holiday memory?
After searching for months I found this video of the people that we saw dropping out of the sky that morning.
I didn’t think so, but the floodgates had opened. I remembered wiling away long hot Ibiza days drinking sangria and eating tapas, followed by misspent nights dancing to our favourite DJs. I remembered the simple, but delicious seafood lunch served to us by the captain of a Turkish gulet we’d hired off the Turquoise Coast of Antalya. I remembered hiking the wild and windy coastline of southern Corsica, staying in some random Moroccan billionaire’s summer home that our friends Gwen and Didou were managing for the season. I remembered trekking through vast mountainous canyons to explore the ancient Jordanian city of Petra, and then a few days later bobbing around the Dead Sea, smearing its healing and beautifying mud all over our faces and bodies. And I remembered countless summer days drowsily contemplating the hypnotic cicadas in a tiny ancient hamlet called Adine in Siena, Italy, one of my favourite places on earth. Occasionally we’d summon the energy to drive into town to eat pici served with locally caught wild boar. And afterwards we’d devour nocciola and Amarena gelato while sitting on the cobble stones of the town square, watching toddlers awkwardly chasing pigeons and teenagers awkwardly chasing each other. Later that night David and I chased fireflies in the hamlet’s olive grove.
Late summer days in Siena’s Piazza del Campo
I remembered trips to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. Mostly just to eat the street food, but also to lounge around on beaches or pools or in izakayas and rooftop bars, kicking off the day-drinking with breakfast beers and seamlessly graduating to lunchtime cocktails and then bottles of wine at dinner. I remembered evenings wandering narrow backstreet warrens looking for the perfect place for a late night meal, and somehow always finding it.
And of course I remembered Greece and her beautiful islands, which I discovered relatively late in life. First Mykonos, and then, in quick succession, Santorini, Milos, Sifnos, Naxos, Zakynthos, Skiathos and Kefalonia. Distinct memories of wandering down overgrown sandy tracks to discover completely secluded beach coves, with the bluest and clearest water I’ve ever seen in my life. Enjoying the simple but delicious food of my childhood, chased down with surprisingly good wine by the kilo. Always followed by the obligatory afternoon siesta. Balmy fragrant nights laden with the promise of a good time floating on the sound of a bouzouki being strummed somewhere. Everywhere. These are all gorgeous memories that I will keep forever. But are they my favourite summer memories? I realised that no, they were not. To access those, I had to go back to Australia. I had to go much further back in time, to my childhood. I had to go back to the farm.
If sheer perfection was the criteria…
When I was about 12 years old my parents went into cahoots with my aunt Dimi and uncle Alex to buy a plot of land in the Victorian countryside. I remember being dragged around with my sisters to endless real estate inspections of properties on the Mornington Peninsula, about an hour and a half drive from Melbourne, until they eventually found the perfect one. Lot 3, Boneo Road, Cape Schanck was a hilly ten acres of overgrown tea-tree shrubs and native grasses. And that was it. It was wild, it was untamed and it was magnificent. For the next five or six years, we spent most weekends and summer holidays at the farm. And even though it was, in no way, shape or form an actual farm, that was what we called it.
In the beginning, we camped in tents. Later on my Dad laid the foundation for what would come to be known as The Shed. And of course, because it was my Dad, it wasn’t built out of wood or steel or bricks. He built it with materials used by NASA. And I am not even joking about that. The stuff was basically slabs of Styrofoam enclosed in a bright green metallic casing. The shed was four walls and a roof. Our family of five had a tiny bedroom to sleep in, and my aunt and uncle had an even tinier one. My Dad built us all bunk beds. The rest of the shed was an open space kitchen, living, dining area. The floor was a concrete slab. And that was our holiday home. It wasn’t fancy, but it was ours.
Our days and nights were filled with adventures, accompanied by a rotating roster of friends, children of family friends, cousins and even kids off the street. One morning while my sisters and I were playing at the bottom of the driveway three young girls on ponies materialised in front of us and asked us if we wanted to go for a ride. Hell yeah we wanted to go for a ride. Other times the three of us, and whoever happened to be around at the time, would explore the property, trying so hard to get lost, going so deep into the dense tea-tree shrub that we sometimes had to fight through the thickets on our hands and knees, our arms and legs covered in bloody scratches. We were always so disappointed when we hit the fence-line and had to retreat back to the clearing. But that never stopped us from trying again.
I learned how to drive on the farm, in an old unroadworthy Land Rover that needed a crank to start the engine. The same Land Rover that we would all pile into and be jostled around on the 2.5km dirt track down to a secluded, rocky beach that was essentially our own private paradise. I don’t remember seeing more than a handful of people in all the years we spent on that beach, and when I recently tried to find it on a map, I discovered that it still doesn’t even have a name. If you want to find it, it’s somewhere between Gunnamatta and Fingal beaches, but good luck getting to it.
Driving lessons on the farm, being herded by Joshua.
Oh, that beach. It was ours! It was ours! We’d drive down in the morning and stay all day, carrying down platters of homemade food for a sumptuous feast sprawled on the rocks. We’d recline for a while in the shade of a rocky overhang, and afterwards we would fish, always hooking a bounteous catch of butterfish to cook on the BBQ later that day. Sometimes we would search for elusive abalone in the many tidal pools, and sometimes we would be lucky. My Mum would tenderise and pickle it, and cook it up in a stir-fry with rice, the thought of which still makes my mouth water. My sisters and I would confidently leap from rock to rock, like agile little mountain goats. We trudged up massive sand dunes, just so that we could tumble back down them, and then do it all again. And we dove and frolicked in our very special, swimming pool-sized rockpool for hours, exploring every single nook and underwater cranny, trying to catch the little fishies that had been washed in with the previous tide. But they were always quicker than we were, and they were always somehow able to dart away, out of reach of our prune-fingered grasp. This is what favourite summer holiday memories are made of.
The rockpool.
Back at the farm we zoomed around on my uncle Alex’s three wheel motorcycle. Oh what a thrill it was to wrap my arms around his waist as he floored it up what felt like an insurmountable summit. The wind whipped my hair around, because it was the 1980s and helmets weren’t a thing. I was always scared that he would rev it just a little bit too much and the two of us would flip backwards. But facing that fear and always reaching the crest and landing those three wheels back on solid ground was an exhilarating experience that I’m fairly sure not many other 14 year old girls were lucky enough to have.
Our hobby farm was right next door to an actual, working farm with a couple of horses and a paddock full of grazing sheep. There were also ducks and chickens and a pigeon coop and a small corn field and a gorgeous black and white Border Collie called Joshua. Every time we drove up the driveway to the farm, Joshua would be there waiting for us. And apart from dinnertime and bedtime he spent every waking minute with our family. He would even chase the Land Rover to the beach, whenever we drove down there, and he’d spend the whole day with us. I don’t know if Farmer Murphy was aware of it or not, but Joshua was our first family dog. We loved him and he loved us.
My sisters and I developed a routine of knocking on the Murphys’ back door every Sunday night, collecting large hessian bags filled with stale loaves of sliced bread and heading down to the pastures to feed the sheep. I remember the first time we did this. We entered the enclosure and clicked the gate behind us. It felt like every single sheep in that three acre pasture stopped what they were doing and looked up at us. And then, the sheep started running. A hundred sheep stampeding towards three nervous young girls holding sheep food. I’m pretty sure we all started screaming, and I’m pretty sure I thought the three of us were going to die. And as they approached us and the fear escalated, somehow, we started running back towards them and the killer sheep dispersed. And we laughed and laughed, mostly as a release to the fear, but also because it was just funny. And we started throwing slices of bread all over the place and the sheep lunged at it like ravenous wild animals. And when we ran out of bread, the sheep just disinterestedly sauntered away. As if nothing incredible or mind-blowing had just happened.
The Murphy’s were really nice to us, letting us feed their sheep and steal their dog. They sometimes even let us chase around the cute little springtime ducklings and chicks that had just hatched. But the truth is that they probably didn’t love us being there. We were a rowdy bunch of Greek immigrants who would often be up until the wee hours of the morning revelling and carousing and generally being festive motherfuckers! I remember one particularly merry night, my Dad was playing guitar and Alex, taken with the spirit, grabbed a drawer from his bedroom dresser, theatrically flipping the contents on the floor and, with his leg up on a chair, started using it as a drum, rhythmically banging the shit out of it. My Mum, inspired, grabbed a coffee jar full of rice from the kitchen to use as another instrument in this unhinged jam session, and everyone danced and sang along. We kids watched in wonder as our normally mannerly relatives just rocked the fuck out. The carefree exuberance and unbridled high spirits of moments like these stay with me, and fill me with joy decades later. These are what favourite summer holiday memories are made of.
Sometimes the singalongs came at the end of the night. Sometimes they were the opening act. Depending on the tides, sometimes my sisters and I would be woken up at one or two in the morning and then we’d all drive down to the Fingal Beach hiking trails. A dozen of us carting buckets, torches and gardening gloves, we traipsed down the steep, sandy steps to the rocky beach below to catch crabs. As the tides started going out, the crabs would emerge from the rockpools in search of food and we would be there to grab them. We were young kids running around in the middle of the night in gum boots on jagged rocks catching crabs as the tide went out into an inky black, and sometimes wild, roaring sea. Hell yeah!
The cliff path might have felt like a thousand steps going down, but it felt like a million steps climbing back up with buckets full of salivating crabs. We’d drive back to the shed, put a huge pot of water on the stove to boil and enjoy a glorious supper of the most ridiculously tasty, freshly caught seafood bonanza you could ever imagine. The memory of cracking open a thick leg to pull out delicious, tender, meaty morsels of crab at 3 o’clock in the morning, bleary eyed and surrounded by my loved ones has to be one of my favourite summer holiday memories in a life filled with them.
I spent those years on the farm being a free and feral child, living a wild and precious life. Whenever David and I go back home to visit Australia, my sisters and I always make sure to get together at Fingal Picnic Area where we used to barbeque the butterfish that we caught on our private beach all those years ago. We gather now to reminisce about those good old days, and to pay our respects and to honour the memory of the wonderful childhood our parents gave us.
My Mum, my sisters, fourteen year old me and a family friend at the Fingal BBQ
We were there just a few days ago and on our drive to the picnic area, I asked to stop off at Lot 3, Boneo Road. A gorgeous new house has since been built on the highest point of the property, but the old shed is still there. A little nervously, we walked (trespassed?) up the driveway to the shed which is now being used as a garden shed. The exterior has been painted black, but inside it’s still bright green. The old grape trellis my father built is in total disrepair, and the garden my Mum cultivated is a riot of wild grape vines, passionfruit plants and lemon trees. But, most notably, nature has fiercely taken back what was once hers. The natural world that we constantly had to fight off to build the shed, and to live in the shed during our summer holidays, has won the battle. Mother Nature, biding her time, grew back with a vengeance, surrounding the shed, enveloping it and ultimately reclaiming her space. My Mum and Dad are gone. Alex is gone. One day Mary, Pieta, Dimi and I will be gone, and every single memory of those summer days down at the farm will be gone. But as we stood there the other day, looking at this familiar, cubic building that somehow seems to have become part of the landscape of what used to be the farm, I found that there was something really beautiful about that. The farm now belongs to someone else. The shed, still standing nearly 40 years after my Dad built it, belongs to someone else. And yet somehow it still all belongs to us. It will always belong to us.
The top of the shed felt like the top of the world.
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is frequently called the most moral army in the world, and this is something I’d like to examine further because to my untrained eyes and ears that assertion seems like absolute utter bullshit. Firstly, isn’t it a little bit disingenuous to call any army moral? An army is a military apparatus designed to kill people and to perpetrate war. Nothing moral about it. But the Israelis will insist on the morality of theirs. Words are awesome, and personally I love them. But actions are awesome too. And actions is where Israel’s army is found to be seriously lacking in morality as I will outline below.
Most of you are probably aware that there is a genocide happening in Gaza right now. So let’s talk about the role of Israel’s extremely moral army in that genocide. I have been pretty fixated (some might say obsessed) with what is happening in Gaza. I admit that while I was aware that shit was going down in the Occupied Palestinian Territories before 7th October, I wasn’t paying it a lot of attention. My bad. But I’ve made up for that in the last few months. I’ve been very active on Instagram and Twitter, interacting, liking, sharing and posting on behalf of the Palestinian people. My heart belongs to the Palestinian people. And it breaks for them. So what happens when you’re on Instagram and Twitter at least two hours a day for 116 days, advocating for a group of people who are being slaughtered in a bloody genocide, is that you see some shit. You see some horrendous, abhorrent, heart-stopping shit. And all of it, without exception, has been committed by the world’s most moral army, the Israeli Defence Force.
Before I let loose with a bunch of examples for you to check out, I do want to say that the IDF does not exist in a vacuum. The Israeli Defence Force is the military arm of what is currently the most right-wing government in Israel’s short but bloodthirsty history. And in a recent poll, 60% of Jewish citizens stated that Israel is not actually using sufficient force in Gaza. They believe that the Israeli government should escalate the amount of force it is using. I’m personally shocked at that, but I suppose I shouldn’t be, seeing as the Jewish citizens of Israel democratically voted in the current ultra-far right, Zionist government. This is what they wanted.
Before I start I want to say that everything I’m describing below is linked to a photo or video. Please don’t feel obliged to watch them, but of course if you feel up to it you are free to do so. You are also free to verify these videos for yourself. You do not need to take my word that they are authentic, though I have cross-referenced them myself. If you do find something that is inaccurate or inappropriately skewed I would really like for you to let me know because I want this to be a factual account of what’s going on with the IDF.
OK, so let’s start with this super charming little wartime tradition happening in Israel right now where for a few bucks, citizens are invited to write messages on the bombs that the IDF uses to destroy Palestinian lives. How delightful. Let me go grab my Sharpie.
Israelis seem nice
Here’s a super romantic marriage proposal by one IDF soldier to another on a rubble-strewn Gaza beach. And another fantasy wedding proposal in front of a school that the IDF had just bombed and destroyed. The guy promises his wife-to-be that they will build their future home on these desecrated grounds.
Honestly, if David and I hadn’t eloped, I definitely would have scrawled our save-the-date wedding message in red paint on the remains of a destroyed Palestinian home. Isn’t that what every woman dreams of?
Israelis seem nice
And the morality just keeps on coming. One Israeli major dedicates the demolition of a Gaza building to his two year old daughter on her birthday. Gee, thanks dad. Israeli soldiers whoop and cheer as they celebrate the bombing of a UN school, which had been housing thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians. Where will they go? Who cares. And here are some awesome, moral soldiers taking photos of themselves mocking and degrading a young Palestinian detainee.
Israelis seem nice
Watch an Israeli soldier on a TikTok chat recount with absolute delight and unadulterated glee how she has personally killed two Palestinians and how she’d love to kill some more. And here’s another, older, video from 2007, in which a former Israeli soldier reaches back into the darkness of her memories and laughs disquietingly as she recalls her Lady Macbeth moment after killing a young Palestinian boy.
Yet another young woman serving in the world’s most moral army (coz equal rights = morality, yo!) giggling after committing the war crime of indiscriminately firing a grenade launcher at random homes in the Gaza village of Shuja’iyya. And then for some crazy reason, deciding to proudly post it on social media. And here, a video that I was initially very hesitant to include because I wasn’t sure if it was for real or not, but it does appear to be an authentic recording of an IDF soldier bragging about killing a 12 year old Palestinian girl and lamenting that there are no more Palestinian babies left to kill. This kind of shit is all over Middle Eastern media but nowhere to be seen on western news outlets in case you were wondering why you haven’t seen it on CNN. By the way, a lot of Zionist apologists piped up to defend this guy and say that he was just joking, of course. Ohhh, it’s a JOKE!!! So funny.
A very morally upright Israeli soldier uploaded this video of a Gaza university that was bombed moments later to his Instagram page with the caption: “Once upon a time there was a university in Gaza”. In the video he says, “We bombed them. That sucks. That’s how you will never become engineers anymore.” The IDF have been focussed on targeting Palestinian academics, killing at least 94 scholars. They have completely destroyed 95, and partially destroyed 295, schools and universities. Can you guess why? Because it’s the right thing to do??
Here’s one lucky gal bragging on a popular women’s Facebook group in Israel about her IDF boyfriend bringing her heaps of new make-up from Gaza!! One switched-on babe from the group, responded, “It’s better if you delete the post. It doesn’t do us a good name at all. Not because I care about the make-up of that Gazan woman who will never see the light of day again in her life, but because I care about that soldier, who can judge him for it or give him a headache”.
Israelis seem nice
And here’s another video of an honourable, young IDF soldier looting the jewellery box of a Gazan woman who has been… who knows, displaced or killed. He chooses a beautiful silver necklace which he plans to gift to his lucky girlfriend Noa. I literally can’t think of a more romantic gift.
Hanukkah was pretty special last year for one group of IDF soldiers who spent it blowing up a bunch of Palestinian homes in Gaza. Afterwards, just for fun they desecrated the sanctity of a West Bank mosque by stomping all over the floor in their shoes, and singing Hanukkah songs and intoning Jewish prayers over the speaker. The extremely virtuous and noble IDF considered this unacceptable behaviour, suspending the soldiers in question. Round of applause! Obviously the soldiers in this video however, in which they mock, desecrate and destroy another mosque, did so in a far morally superior way and therefore they were not suspended by the IDF. Here are some more ethical celebrations of blowing up mosques.
And if you want to see some extremely upstanding IDF soldiers joyfully and heartily singing, “These are your homes, and we are destroying them” as they bulldoze Palestinian homes in Khan Younis, then you’re in luck. As a bonus, here’s a group of young IDF guns cheerfully mocking Palestinian life in an hilarious video, after which they playfully burn down someone’s home. And then think it’s a great idea to upload it to TikTok. WTF???
This jolly fellow thought it would be a bit of a laugh to get dressed up as Santa Claus while firing shells onto Palestinians on Christmas Day. I can’t think of anything more festive than that! Can you?? And finally, here’s a super fun video (accompanied by an appropriately upbeat soundtrack) showing an IDF soldier dressed up as a dinosaur loading shells into a tank and then bombing the shit out of the civilians in Gaza. Coz genocide is fun!!? I’m rendered speechless when I try to put myself in their shoes and figure out what the fuck they’re thinking when they film themselves doing this. I glitch.
I’ve seen way too many interviews of former IDF soldiers talking about how they treat Palestinians as less than human, inflicting physical and sexual abuse on them. Including children. This is just one sample in which a former IDF soldier describes how her comrades beat up a young Palestinian boy, putting cigarettes out on him, and how her commanding officer was told to cover it up. Moral as fuck.
So that was a small sample of the complete disregard and lack of respect IDF soldiers personally have for Palestinians. But when we talk about an army, we’re talking about a collective unit that has orders from high ranking officials, and ultimately the government. Maybe they’re not doing so great on an individual level. Perhaps, as they like to boast, on a macro level, the IDF could be considered the most moral army in the world?
No. I don’t think so.
Let’s talk about the neonatal intensive care unit babies that Israeli soldiers forced medical staff to leave behind when they violently evacuated Al Shifa hospital at gunpoint on 10th November 2023. One would think that since the IDF soldiers had forced the medical staff to leave the babies behind, they would have arranged for those babies to be taken care of somewhere else. And that’s what they’d promised. But that’s not what happened. They just left them there to die. And the babies died, and there are photos of their tiny little decomposing bodies online from when they were discovered two weeks later. What special kind of monster is capable of leaving behind crying, premature babies that are unable to breathe on their own, knowing that they are going to die a slow and excruciating death? Who does that? I’ll tell you who, it’s the IDF! It’s the most moral army in the world.
Is leaving a bunch of premature babies to die better or worse than what another IDF captain did, which was to take a newborn Palestinian baby girl from Gaza back to Israel with him after finding her in the rubble (that his unit had created). There is no way of knowing whether her parents are dead or alive, but the soldier has since been killed in battle, and the whereabouts of the baby girl are unknown. This doesn’t feel very moral either, does it?
During December I spent about two weeks tracking the atrocities committed by the Israeli Defence Force. Eventually I had to exercise my privilege and stop, because it just felt like the information and the images coming out of Gaza were becoming worse and worse with each passing day, and it was starting to take a toll on my mental health. And things haven’t become better since then, they’ve continued becoming worse. If you have only been following mainstream news outlets you might be shocked to read my observations from that period, but I can assure you that everything I write here actually happened. Each fact is verifiable, but again, if you discover any inaccuracies please let me know.
On 13th December, the bodies of 15 Palestinian men, women, children and newborn babies who had been sheltering at Shadia Abu Ghazala School were found piled up in the corner of a room. They had been shot, execution-style, at point blank range by moral IDF soldiers. They were not Hamas. They were not collateral damage. They were intentionally murdered.
On the same day, several Palestinians sheltering in a UNRWA school at Beit Hanoun were killed execution-style by IDF soldiers. Including babies. The most moral army in the world killed babies execution-style. Not with bombs from afar, not with shells. Not with a drone. Not even with hand grenades. But with bullets, from a gun, at point blank range. There are photos.
On 15th December, Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa and chief Gaza correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh were working when they were targeted and hit by a missile from an Israeli drone. They were both wearing press vests. Both Abu Daqqa and Al-Dahdouh (whose wife, son, daughter and grandson were killed six weeks earlier by Israeli forces in a targeted bombing of the building they were sheltering in) were injured but only al-Dahdouh was able to make it to paramedics and survive. Over the next five hours Abu Daqqa lay on the ground and bled out. Paramedics attempted to approach him, but were shot at by snipers. The IDF knew that it was all being recorded, and they did that anyway.
Also on 15th December three Israeli hostages who had been separated from their captors tried to get the attention of the Israeli army. Doing their best to demonstrate that they were not Hamas fighters, they had taken off their shirts and were waving a white flag. Despite this, they were shot at by IDF snipers who thought they presented a “security threat”. Two of the hostages died instantly, while the third, injured, ran for cover in a nearby building calling out for help in Hebrew. When he came back out again, a soldier opened fire and killed him. Following the breaking of this story, there was a massive outcry in Israel, but I’m left wondering why there was no massive outcry when the IDF did the exact same thing to thousands of Palestinian civilians? The reporting of it in international media stated that the IDF had “mistakenly” shot the hostages, but that’s not what happened at all. They were deliberately shot and killed. Because it was thought that they were Palestinian.
On the 15th December, Human Rights Watch accused the state of Israel of starving people in the Gaza Strip. The NGO claimed that the IDF was deliberately preventing the delivery of water, food and fuel to Palestinians. That was six weeks ago. Conditions have now reached famine levels of starvation.
On 16th December 2023, outside Kamal Adwan hospital, IDF soldiers in bulldozers drove over and crushed several tents, in which sick and injured refugees were sheltering. Bulldozers! They buried them alive and then bulldozed over the top of them, killing dozens of innocent people in a sadistic act of senseless cruelty.
Also on 16th December, an IDF sniper shot and killed a woman seeking shelter with her adult daughter in the Holy Family Parish Catholic church. When her daughter ran out to help her, the IDF shot and killed her too. They were Christian. They were not Hamas. They were not collateral damage. They were murdered in cold blood.
On 18th December, IDF soldiers bombed the maternity ward at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, a city in the south of Gaza. In case you missed them the first time round, I’m going to repeat the words maternity ward.
The aftermath
The attack was part of a greater scheme to destroy all of Gaza’s health facilities, including the targeting of doctors and their families. Several people, including many pregnant women were injured, and one 13 year old girl died. She is not a statistic. Her name was Dina Abu Mehsen, and a few weeks earlier she had lost both her parents and two of her brothers in an IDF airstrike on her home. She also lost one of her legs. Somehow, she hadn’t lost hope though, and while she was recovering in hospital following her amputation she said that she wanted to become a doctor so that she could help other children. On 18th December, an IDF tank shell ended that dream when it penetrated the ceiling of her hospital room and hit her in the head, killing her instantly.
Say her name! Dina Abu Mehsen.
Are you tired yet? You should be. This shit is relentless. On 21st December, Fatima and Ahmed al-Khaldi and their two sons Adam and Faisal ran to a neighbouring house to shelter with around 30 other people after their own home was shelled by the IDF. When the Israeli soldiers arrived, they threw two hand grenades into the house, after which they entered the room and started shooting indiscriminately. Fatima, who was seven months pregnant, bled to death. Her husband and young son Adam were also killed. Her other son, four year old, Faisal, was seriously injured after IDF bullets ruptured his intestine and bladder. He needs six surgeries. There are no hospital facilities left in Gaza to perform these surgeries. The IDF has destroyed them all.
Say his name. Faisal al-Khaldi.
On 23rd December, IDF soldiers used their favourite Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to desecrate the recent graves of Palestinians who had died in a northern Gaza hospital. They dragged the bodies through the dirt, and then used the blade of the bulldozer to crush the corpses. I can think of absolutely no reason to do something like this, except sheer psychopathy and depravity. The literal definition of immorality.
Also in northern Gaza on the 23rd December, a group of pregnant women walking in the rubble, were trying to make their way to Al-Awda Hospital to give birth, and raised white flags when they were approached by an IDF bulldozer. Each of the pregnant women were shot, and their bodies bulldozed. Why?? Ethics? Virtue?? Explain it to me like I’m five years old.
On Christmas Day, an Israeli photojournalist working with the IDF uploaded this video he’d taken of hundreds of civilians, who had been detained, ordered to strip to their underwear and kneel on the grass on the grounds of Gaza Stadium. In the background, bulldozers can be seen digging holes in the ground. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and the UN have both confirmed reports that the Israeli Defence Force carried out field executions of many civilians, lining them up on the edge of the bulldozed pits before executing them and burying them in mass graves. I don’t know why they would do this. I don’t know why they are doing any of it.
On 26th December the corpses of 80 Palestinians, which had been taken from various locations around Gaza, were delivered by the IDF to Rafah. The bodies, in various stages of decomposition, had obviously been tampered with and many were missing organs. This is a war crime, and it is a crime against humanity. It is an abhorrent violation of a human being’s sanctity, and a theft of their dignity in death. It is not the actions of a moral army.
On 28th December, the IDF admitted that the Christmas Day massacre they committed in Maghazi refugee camp, killing 70 Palestinians, was a mistake because “the type of weaponry used did not match the nature of the mission”. They also confessed that they had bombed buildings that were not actual targets, resulting in unnecessary civilian casualties. I take two things away from their statements. Firstly, there was no apology. Secondly, it’s implied that the 2000 pound (900kg) bombs they have been using on the rest of Gaza are considered appropriately matched to the nature of their missions. Which seems batshit crazy, until you realise that their mission is genocide. And then it makes perfect sense.
Also on the 28th December, it was reported that the IDF raided nine West Bank money exchanges, arbitrarily declaring them terrorist organisations that were funneling money to Hamas. In total USD25 million dollars has been reported to have been stolen by the IDF. Kinda reminds me a little bit of how the Nazis funded a third of their war effort with money stolen from Jewish people under the pretence of increased taxes. Same morality vibe.
I don’t know about you but I struggle to find anything (ANYTHING) moral about the way the Israeli Defence Force behaves when it comes to Palestinians. I find them despicable, deplorable and disgusting. But Israelis appear to have a different definition of morality than the rest of us. A sick and twisted definition. In October 2023 Israeli MP Galit Distel Atbaryan called for the complete destruction of Gaza in a Facebook post, saying “Revengeful and vicious IDF is required here. Anything less than that is immoral.” I recently watched another video of an IDF soldier questioning the morality of the Israeli army, but then turning around and saying that their morality problem was that they hadn’t killed enough. That the most moral thing for them to do would be to kill more Arabs. All the Arabs.
I think there’s something wrong with the narrative that Israelis are fed about Palestinians which feeds into an insane amount of hatred, vitriol and bloodlust. From a very young age, Israeli schoolchildren are taught that Palestinians are nothing more than unworthy refugees or primitive farmers. Or worse, terrorists. The school system teaches kids that Jewish people are superior to Muslims, and it teaches them how to hate Palestinians. It teaches them how to live with Israel’s occupation of over five million people and be OK with it. And sadly, the soldiers of the IDF are a product of that racist and bigoted system. Can we please stop pretending that there’s anything moral about that.
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