When Too Much Is Not Enough - TomDispatch.com

When Too Much Is Not Enough - TomDispatch.com https://tomdispatch.com/when-too-much-is-not-enough/ Nan Levinson, Assessing the Flames of Protest Posted on July 16, 2024 From Gaza to the West Bank to the Israeli-Lebanese borderlands, it’s been a genuine nightmare. The devastation in Gaza remains surreal and almost impossible to take in. Housing, hospitals, schools, religious institutions, you name it — they’re all now a “maze of rubble” while the fighting just goes on (and on and on) with Palestinians (and far smaller numbers of Israelis) still dying daily. The normally cited death toll of Gazans now sits at 38,000 (with untold thousands more buried under the rubble or in mass graves); the death toll of Israeli soldiers is far more modest. It’s been nine months of intense war on a stretch of land that, unimaginably enough, is just 25 miles long with — despite some negotiations now underway — no end yet in sight. Having fought their way in a devastating fashion from the northern reaches of Gaza to its southern border, Israeli forces are now returning to areas they’ve already largely destroyed to do yet more damage, even as the possibility of another war on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon seems to be revving up, and conditions on the West Bank are growing far worse. It’s all hard to take in. Had you been told that such a set of events would happen before they began, my guess is that you wouldn’t have believed it possible. Yet here we are while, in our world, the very idea of supporting a “cease fire” in Gaza, once a major focus of attention at the United Nations, seems to have more or less disappeared. And this was the world in which, as TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson explains today, U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself afire in protest (having made out a will leaving what money he had to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund). It’s hard to imagine a more extreme act — the decision to quite literally obliterate yourself to make a point, destroy your own life to emphasize the nightmarish acts of others while trying to end a horror beyond compare. Let Levinson take you into just such a world (which also happens to be ours) and make some sense of it. Sigh. Tom