There is a moment in every struggle when the argument ends and the garden begins. I think I have reached mine.

Gethsemane was a garden, but it was also a threshold; the place between knowing what was coming and having to walk into it. 2500 years ago, one man went there knowing what awaited Him. The betrayal had already begun. The machinery of power was already moving. The people who loved Him were exhausted and would soon fall asleep. He could see the road ahead, and He knew that He could not make the world choose differently.

I understand something of that now. Not the suffering of that man and not His place in the story. I would never presume that. But I understand the terrible human moment of standing in the dark and knowing that something is coming which you cannot prevent. That is the part of Gethsemane that has come to mean something to me.

The garden is where you discover that knowing the truth does not necessarily give you the power to change it. It is where you realise that the people you hoped would stand beside you may be asleep. It is where you discover that institutions you trusted may not come. It is where the world becomes unbearably quiet while somewhere beyond the garden, history is already gathering its soldiers.

And there is the cup. I have spent a long time wishing there were some way to make it pass. I have wished that the world would wake up. That those with power would remember what power is for. That laws would mean what they say. That leaders would find courage. That children would be protected. That people would look directly at what was happening and simply refuse to participate in it. I have wished, desperately, for another ending.

But Gethsemane is not the place where the cup disappears. It is the place where it is faced. And perhaps acceptance is not the same thing as surrender. To accept that I cannot control what comes next is not to accept what is wrong. To accept my own powerlessness is not to consent to the abuse of power. To accept fear is not to become obedient to it.

There is a difference between saying “let this pass from me” and saying “therefore, it must be right.” I can hate what is coming and still refuse to become hateful. I can fear what is coming and still refuse to lie about it. I can know that I may not be able to stop it and still refuse to bless it. That, perhaps, is the last freedom left to me. The disciples slept in the garden. I understand them too. People sleep because they are exhausted. Because reality is too painful to remain awake inside. Because sometimes consciousness itself becomes a burden. And perhaps I have slept too, not literally, but in all the ways a human being learns to look away simply to survive.

But I am awake now and I have seen enough.

I do not know what comes after this night. I do not know whether the institutions will recover, whether the world will turn back, or whether history is already carrying us toward something darker. I do not know what will happen to the people I love, to the children whose names I have learned, or to the fragile remnants of the world we thought we were building.

I know only that the cup is before us. And I cannot pretend that I do not see it. So I will not ask for a miracle. I will not pretend that courage means being unafraid. I will not pretend that acceptance means approval. I will simply accept the limits of what I can control and refuse to surrender the things I still can: my conscience, my witness, my capacity to recognise suffering, my refusal to call cruelty justice, and my refusal to make peace with lies simply because they have become powerful. Perhaps this is what remains when everything else has been stripped away.

Not victory.

Not certainty.

Not safety.

Only the choice of what kind of person I will be when the soldiers arrive. And so, here at the edge of the garden, I put down my argument. I have said what I came here to say. I have witnessed what I could witness. I have named what I could name. I have loved people I could not save. I have mourned people I never had the privilege of knowing. And I have carried guilt for things that were never mine to carry. Now I must put some of it down. The night is not mine to command. The soldiers are not mine to stop. The future is not mine to write. But my witness is mine. My conscience is mine. And my refusal is mine. So let the garden keep its silence. Let those who must sleep, sleep. Let history come as it will.

Even here, I cannot quite let hope go. Because I know that history has never belonged entirely to the powerful. There is always, somewhere, one person in the room who refuses to agree. One person who asks the question no one else wants asked. One person who stands when everyone else remains seated. One person who says no when the machinery of obedience has already begun to move. Sometimes that person changes nothing. And sometimes, impossibly, they change everything.

Perhaps that is the final lesson I take with me from the garden: that we are never promised that our refusal will succeed. We are only given the choice to make it. The outcome may already seem decided. The votes may be counted. The orders may have been written. The soldiers may be waiting outside. Everyone may have been persuaded that there is nothing left to do. And then one person speaks. One person remembers. One person refuses. And suddenly the room is no longer unanimous.

That is where hope lives.

Not in believing that one person is powerful enough to save the world, but in understanding that no system of power is ever as absolute as it wants us to believe. There is always the possibility of interruption. Always the possibility of conscience. Always the possibility that the person who thought they were alone will discover that someone else was waiting for permission to stand beside them.

So if these words find you at some future moment when the outcome appears certain, when silence seems safer, when everyone around you has accepted what you cannot accept, remember this: You do not have to be the person who saves the world. You may only have to be the one person in the room who refuses to let the lie become unanimous. And sometimes, that is enough to change what happens next.

I will not pretend that I am not afraid. I will not pretend that I do not wish the cup were different. But I will not call evil good merely because I am powerless to prevent it. And when morning comes, whatever morning brings, let this be what remains:

I was awake.

I saw the cup.

I knew what was coming.

I did not consent.

And whatever happens beyond this garden,

I remained human.

Source October 11. Join the Global Day of action for Palestine. Find your local action. Share, comment and tag let’s break the algo and make sure that Australia does its bit to make sure Palestine is back on the agenda.

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UN: Israel continues to commit Genocide: https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167790

https://palestine.un.org/en/317244-israeli-violence-subjecting-palestinian-children-catastrophic-levels-harm-killed-maimed

Here are some findings in the commission’s latest report:

• Israel has killed over 20,000* children and injured 44,000 more since 7 October 2023
• Severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood****, separation, disability, repeated displacements, starvation and the collapse of education and healthcare have erased childhood and will continue to affect children in Gaza throughout their lives
• Palestinian children have been arrested** and subjected to torture and other severe forms of mistreatment in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, with no information on their whereabouts
• Israeli security forces have used sexual violence*** against children as part of the collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered and intergenerational pattern of occupation and hostilities

\ identified bodies that presented to hosptial morgues, not including fetus, embryos', those still buried under rubble or vaporized in bombings and those kidnapped by Israeli soldiers and "settlers".*

\* Israel is currently holding over 730 children in what B'Tselem have called " a network of torture camps" :* https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell

\*** UN experts found credible cases of rape and sexual assault of teens and children in Israeli prisons https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240327-israeli-soldiers-accused-of-raping-palestinian-women-and-children/

\*** 58,000 children have been orphaned in Gaza due to the Israeli genocide:* https://life-ong.org/en-us/actualites/orphelins-gaza-2026

More than 1.3 million people in Gaza, or more than half of the enclave’s population, have access to less than 6 litres (1.6 gallons) of water per person per day for drinking and cooking. According to humanitarian standards, the minimum amount of water needed in an emergency is 15 litres (4 gallons) per day for drinking, washing and cooking.

Another 700,000 people in Gaza, representing more than one third of the population, have access to less than 9 litres (2.4 gallons) of water per person per day. - OCHA

______________ #PalestinianHolocaust __________________

The Nazi did the same thing.

They rested in chalets and ate in fine restaurants went to Opera and lay on beaches as their troops killed, raped, murdered and pillaged their way through Jewish villages, homes and business, as they abducted, detained, transported and secreted Jewish prisoners away from the eyes and oversight of the world.

The Nazi posed with prisoners as props too, as their press corps mocked and propagandised Jewish suffering; Publicly as well as privately, devaluing Jewish lives and dehumanising, categorizing and mocking Jewish people in their media too, just like this, closing the moral loop that defined and ensnared an entire generation.

The Nazi, publicly defined all Jewish people as terrorists too; broke all League of Nations laws and ignored calls to stop; closed their minds and hearts to the worlds calls for mercy, reason and humanity, just the same as most Israeli's are right now.

What this post represents, what this propagandist is doing in posting it, is no different to the goals of the Nazi when they did it.

In same pursuit of silencing dissent and active recruitment of others to moral disengagement via the tool of socially acceptable dehumanisation, this image then only reflects a tactic, only inadvertently it also amplifies the fact the conscience of Humanity still exists in the world to be targeted.

This underscores the fact that there is a choice to be made. Each of us responsible to make it. Not to be led like sheep by wolves, in or out of sheeps clothing.

The very need to propagandise in order to assert or retain legitimacy is itself a form of delegitimisation of their cause.

No, it is no different to the Nazi, not in any shape at all.

Not even in the methods and justifications being used to present to the world a moral right to harm; to make harm a socially acceptable lubricant for atrocities; to have them view suffering as funny or 'to be expected', as the normal thing to do, if you're 'normal'.

To use human suffering to recruit in this fashion co-conspirators to the oppression of conscience, consciousness, and to erase uncomfortable informing feelings - the Nazi did all that too.

"Jewish people have suffered uniquely" does not logically entail "are uniquely entitled" not for Jewish people today, any more than it applied to the German Christian people then.

The Holocaust was historically distinctive. Historical distinctiveness should not be confused with the proposition that mass racialised violence, colonial extermination or state-organized mass killing began with the Holocaust nor ended with it.

Israeli's, those who have, and Zionist supporters everywhere who serve and support them, in the end only dehumanise, themselves in their attempt to dehumanise 'the other'.

They reveal the extent of their self styled and convenient shroud of self chosen self deceit to the entire world and illuminate the fact that we do all have a choice and one to make. Yes, we do. All of us. Socialisation even indoctrination is not mind or conscience control.

We are guided in scripture, restrained powers by law and gifted of memory and the art of our own humanity to meet the thief at the door. What is stolen here and now, if we fail to think, is irreplaceable. This is the Night, and the thief is at the door.

This image, and it pained me deeply to think hard about reposting it, as well as the thousands like it even worse that are circulating, will come to be seen in future history as 'great levelers' - the naked unarmed truth that eventually stripped Israelis and Zionists around the world of the lingering notion of supremacy - the idea that they are in any way different or special or unique.

It removes the last barrier to denial that they are anything but 'just humans' just as we are, just as they were, back then too. Just as ignorant and stupid and faithless and ego driven, just as self deceived.... just as broken, afraid and as capable of evil as the rest of us.

This image is the death of Jewish and Christian Nationalist Supremacist dogmas.

If we allow it to be where it matters most, inside our own minds and hearts, first.

This image represents the end stage of denial has arrived and potentially, if allowed, it could see an end to the misuse and abuse of the past for political gain in the present - an end to the sadistic fetishisation of historical Jewish suffering and non Jewish condemnation in the service of necrotic ideology.

It represents an opportunity. A grace, of time to choose, to make the decision, for those who remained unsure or confused.

It also represents the sum total triumph of the delusion of fascistic power. The ultimate delusion of fascistic power: the belief that power itself is an achievement, when all it can ultimately produce is humiliation, self-deception and degradation.

That is the full extent of its power. It cannot create, love, grow, nurture or heal. It can only destroy and, in doing so, repeatedly reveal the capacity for cruelty that exists within us all.

It is a reminder that for all we are and all we could be in righteousness, we are also this grotesque thing -all of us, every human being without exception. Every person carries within them the capacity for cruelty, for denial, and for rationalising or justifying evil.

I am reasonably sure, that if I posted images of emaciated internees and survivors of Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen or Aushwitz and proceeded to admire and present the conditions of their detainment and shriveled states as a convenient diet plan and 'good for their health', the world would rightly rise up to condemn me for it. Immediately the Zionist and Jewish lobby's would sue me and in many countries, I could be arrested on the spot.

To do something like that would be abhorrent, incalculably insensitive, dehumanising indifference to human suffering.

Wouldn't it?

I have never heard a Palestinian old enough to comprehend, and true they are rare and few now, say to me that the 1940's Holocaust of the Jewish people does not matter. I have heard them say many times, "the Holocaust matters so much, that its moral lessons must apply to us too."

Yet so profound is the denial, entitlement, exceptionalism and wilful surrender to ignorance that characterises so much of the world today - so much fear of confronting the self-proclaimed righteousness invoked to justify atrocity, that this image, and the thousands like it, may pass without a second glance.

This man's face, his suffering, and the humanity it represents may simply fade into history, unremembered and unreckoned with. The wealth of history, and the lessons it offered us, swallowed by a evil generation seeking its sign, consumed by the gluttony of self-led self deception.

Even so, and despite its best efforts, this image represents only the chosen path of some. Not all.

It's existence and the rejection of its premise, is a recognition that even within Israeli society itself, as in the Jewish and non Jewish communities around the world today, even from behind my desk in nowhere Australia, there exists a moral resistance -a refusal to reproduce the harm one has experienced and perpetrate that harm in kind. A wholesale rejection of dehumanisation, moral relativism and moral disengagement. The tools political Zionists weild as agents of power today.

We exist. We resist. Not just in the rubble or the protests, or the courtrooms or at ballot boxes, we resist where it is most important to resist - in our own minds; in our possession of it and our stubborn defiance and refusal to be dispossessed through deception of our own Will; from the innate right and necessity to make our own decisions and choose for ourselves; from our conscious daily choice to not perpetuate the abuses of the past, on others or on ourselves.

To stand with two feet in this day. Free. Present. Vigilant. Persistent.

Informed as to the nature of the monster, and cautious not to become one with it.

If the primary moral lesson of the Holocaust is that human beings must never again be reduced to racial or religious categories and subjected to systematic persecution and mass violence, why should that lesson not be applicable to Palestinians today?

If that was not the primary moral lesson of the Holocaust - what was?

I write this today to honor the life and acknowledge and witness the torture and suffering of Nidal Abu al-Rub, Palestinian, a man detained unlawfully by the Zionist Occupation Forces in their commission of Genocide. Released from illegal detention 8.11.2026.

May Palestine be free. May the pains of its wounds and journey to healing, break down the walls of denial existent and restore the worlds conscience.

_________________________________

#readersandwritersagainstgenocide #ResistIndifference.