“How are you?” people ask, as a greeting.

“I’m okay” I mumble, unsure if I should say more.

What do I say? I am fine, I am healthy, I am well-fed, I have water, juice, beer, any drink I want, I have a warm bed in a house, I have a monthly salary that is sufficient, I can travel freely, I have activities to occupy my free time.

But what do I not say? I am not fine, I don’t understand how we are living in a world that accepts human beings blown to shreds, headless, armless, decapitated, burnt, starved, sickened, subjected to sexual abuse of the most vile, torture of physical, mental, emotional nature. Babies, children, teenagers, young men & women, old men & women. All the time, live-streamed to us, the rest of the world, in our safe houses and bubbles.

I try to ignore, to live, to do my work. Conservation. Justice, social and environmental justice. Indigenous Peoples’ rights. International law. Saving nature, biodiversity, landscapes, people-place connections.

And I’m reminded, over and over again, that humans, thousands and thousands of humans, are being torn apart simply for living in their own land, because colonisers want that property. Don’t even think about the damage to trees, to animals, or the carbon emissions from this genocidal campaign. Is this going to be sold as a carbon neutral project in the future? All the emissions from shipping arms and weapons, spy planes, missiles and drones, computer systems that do the automated killing of humans, the emissions from the bombs dropped, all of that offset by fast-growing trees planted over the graves of Palestinian peoples and their rights.

Injustice is no longer a sufficient term for the depraved atrocities that Israel, enabled by the USA, UK, EU, all the White Colonisers, is committing with impunity. What the Palestinians (and Yemenis and Syrians and Lebanese) are made to go through are more than injustices. I don’t know a word in English sufficient to capture the depth and breadth of the complete annihilation of a People and Their Land.

Are we able to be okay, when inhumanity takes power?

I’m not okay and neither should you be.

We should be grieving, not just for the needless senseless loss of thousands and thousands of souls, but for the loss of humanity. That we don’t feel a collective outrage strong enough to stop the powers that be.

I wanted to grieve for the loss of humanity’s compassion, but I realized that wasn’t lost. What was lost, was the facade of western rights and compassion. I wanted to think what’s happening in Gaza is different to all that has happened before. That we’ve gone past where (in)humanity had gone before.

But I realized that’s probably not true. The Iraq war, the Afghan war, the Vietnam war. Hold on, those were not wars. Throwing heaps of explosives and chemical weapons upon a population is not war. I thought that sense of justice and humanity prevailed that ended these brutalities, but it was just strategic. The colonisers have not changed their spots, since the time of Colombia and all through the massacres of native Americans in the 19th century. Indeed, the ‘Enlightenment’ and recent decades of human rights and international law rhetoric are just a fancy coat they put on, discarded now there’s a willing population of genocidal settler-colonial supremacist maniacs to continue the killing of human beings and the pillaging of non-human beings.

Am I then grieving for the loss of western charade of caring about humans, all humans, equally? I think not. I am outraged that I’ve been fooled for this long. And outraged that this is still the system we have, a system that is clearly no longer fit for purpose. And most of all, outraged and outgrieved by the sacrifice of Palestinians, whose only ‘crime’ to suffer the horrendous cruel barbarities inflicted by Israel was that they remained on their own Lands.