In my direct environment there is nobody who cares about what is happening in Gaza. I had a conversation yesterday with someone very close to me and she said: ‘bad stuff happens all the time, why focus on this?’ and ‘you have a personal connection to Palestine, I don’t’ and ‘the same thing is happening all over the world’ and ‘why watch a video of children being blown up, especially before you go to bed?’ I told her this situation is unique, that it doesn’t happen every day that a country can use the latest, most lethal technology to terrorize two million people, half of them children, that so many people are now affected by the horrors they are seeing this could change the world more than the Covid years, I told her that if similar stuff happened to us she’d wish people wouldn’t stay silent about it, but she shruggend and sighed and went back to studying for a pedagogy exam. From what I saw in her course book the material covered something I remember her taking a exam for six years ago as well.
In her defense: she is very good at her job, I’ve seen her help out strangers, is very considered of other people in her direct evironment, she just can’t relate to things happening outside of her personal bubble. I’d think the bombs would have to be dropping in at least a 200 yards radius for her to care. I wonder who has the better attitude, me or her. And this wonderment about who has the better attitude is probably coming from a very competitive place in me. Perhaps the same place that makes Israelis drop bombs on kids and pretend it’s totally justified and ok. Someone else close to me said: ‘happy people don’t have the time to care about Gaza.’ Opposing the shredding of kids can be challenging.
How big should our bubble be?
My mental health blog. A public diary trying to make sense of the world 
From Suffolk East Anglia – 28 May 2024
William! You’re SO right about Israel’s shocking atrocities in Gaza; especially since the latest appalling attacks on Rafa. I wake with dread each morning & watch Aljazeera tv at night, raging & disillusioned by the restricted UK News. Uk’s Cowardly government; & MP Cameron’s unacceptable justifications “But we’re ONLY supplying 1% compared to what USA sends Israel.
UK’s bloody shackled to $3.2bn Israel’s export/imports. So I am boycotting every single item. DISGUSTED that with the ability to do SOMETHING; continue averting their gaze from murderous Netanyahu & his EDF orchestrating another holocaust before our very eyes.
Israel’s SICK people never dealt with their past & as famous author/psychotherapist, Alice Miller ‘Drama of the Gifted Child’ warns that by failing to look at one’s past; feel it, see and actually deal with it; we risk inflicting similar on others. Israel demonstrates its simmering unresolved resentment & rage acted out against their vulnerable innocent Palestinian neighbours.
Someone called Sally Challon imprisoned for killing her husband; after years of appeal, following a newly recognised form of domestic abuse called ” Coercive Control”.
Reading the details I suddenly realised; OMG this was my 22yr marriage & why I found it impossible to describe what I was going through. Subtly clever manipulative psychological mind games. Repeated provocations that went on and on behind closed doors; then finally the last straw that breaks the camel’s back; in front of everyone, eventually I would crack & lose it; appearing to be the offender!
I can see how Gaza & the injustices endured & Israel’s 74yrs of provocation; after 1948 as Miko Peled’s book The General’s Son describing the Nakba & how his father witnessed army comrades’ atrocities; driving out an entire nation, some 750,000 rendering them homeless & stateless. This was why I could relate. At eighteen, for years my mother kept me away from my grandmother; my one safe place; I was suddenly old enough to choose who I would live with.
‘Choice a totally foreign word was never a part of my vocabulary! Growing up involved continual monitoring & domination. A shocking abusive boarding ‘school’ close to the hospital where I coped with years of skin grafts after a near fatal accident in South Africa. Soon after my first birthday my parents left England without me; settling in South Africa.
My father’s Italian mother fled Mussolini WWI with his Dutch father ended up in Egypt where my father was born. He fought with the Allies in the Royal Dutch Army, but England denied him residency at the end of WWII.
My initial two years in Suffolk’s safe, secure tranquility were rudely brought to an end when my father’s letter demanding me. rudely uprooted & bundled into the arms of an air steward. The stopover an airsteward carried down the gangway through the mesmerizing mass of black shiny faces, white teeth bobbing on a sea of colour; past animals hunched in cages & a man with a monkey on his shoulder nibbling a banana.
‘Home’ with a pair of strangers called ‘Mummy’ & ‘Daddy’ is a miserable upper story concrete block of flats. A far cry from my beloved aunts Hilda, Molly & Lettice; who always shared memories of nursing with the RedCross in France & England. No more sitting on Grandpa’s knee in the summerhouse overlooking the millstream; feeding the ducks waddling up the riverbank. Our pair of swans jet skiing the length of river. No more dressing up Granny’s dog Suki; squeezed into my dolly’s clothes; & trundling round the garden in a dolls’ pram
No swallows nesting under the eaves above my bedroom window; but waking to an ugly raucous squawking parrot. Terrifying thunderstorms with hailstones the size of fridge cubes. At the kitchen table eating tea, a meteorite smashed through the window; bouncing on the floor.
Not a single happy memory remain from my time during an Apartheid with a pair of shocking racists. Though young I was ashamed of their racism. Three particularly traumatic episodes remain uppermost. Gaza & Israel’s perpetual provocations, the Nakba driven out of their homes; in the same way my cousins arrived successfully bullied then drove me from the one fleeting safe place I would ever know!
Love Evie ( Granny always called me Evie after her mother Evelyn)
((Hugs)) x
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