Green Shoots: Our anger is key to hope, and our humanity

It is hard to write about things that lighten the heart, that cheer the soul, that tickle our funny bone and make us laugh with abandon. I think it was the people’s poet Mzwakhe Mbuli who asked how he could be expected to write about the beautiful daisies when the horror of apartheid is what was his lived reality? What I really want to write about and explore with you are the green shoots of hope that emerge when we change our behaviour and attitudes, the things that are within our ambit of control, the things that would make for a better world – kindness, love, integrity, compassion.

And I will do that – I have no desire to pontificate and lecture everyone about politics and rights and all those things. “Green Shoots” has to resonate with you who take the time to read the thing, and hopefully move you to think about helping to create a better world. Today, I don’t know if I can do that easily. Today, I have been absorbing the images coming out of Gaza of starving children, clinging to life because that is at the core of every human – to survive. And the Gazans have shown more of that desire to live than most.

I remember. It was the Jews in the concentration camps and ghettoes who showed the same determination to resist their extermination. It was they who refused to die at the hands of the most barbarous system the world had seen. Nazism enabled the most horrendous atrocities to be visited on a people. History is full of these atrocities. It is filled with the stench of genocide – and the inhumanity of the perpetrators. In Namibia, colonial Germany tried to exterminate the Herero and Nama people, and today are being forced into making reparations.

In South Africa, the British interred Afrikaners and black Africans in concentration camps, starving them into a submission that would not happen, that they refused. In Europe, Hitler and his thugs killed 6 million Jews, Sinti, and Roma people, and did all they could to destroy resistance to the Reich. The argument made by Israel is that the Jewish people needed a place they could call their own, where they could be free of the persecution that most of Europe visited on them. This is why they came to Palestine. It didn’t matter that there were people living there – they claimed a God-given right to take over. Anything born out of such violence cannot be maintained without more violence. Israel, with the backing of the USA, UK, and others, has taken that violence to levels even the most zealous of the Nazis and their ilk could not imagine.

Ethnic cleansing first by bombardment, then by starvation. How can we not be angry? But let it not be an impotent anger, where we throw our hands up, hopeless in the face of unspeakable evil. Let us be filled with a rage that says no to evil, that drives us to not shut up when the issue is raised in our social interaction and conversations, but instead to challenge anyone who says Israel is simply defending itself, or that Israel is defending the holy land, or whatever other narrative the evil ones try to spin.

Speak out. Our anger now must drive our refusal to lose our own humanity by giving in to hopelessness. Even if we are not in the halls of the United Nations, we maintain the spark of humanness and love and justice and kindness by affirming our solidarity with those who survive in spite of Israel’s genocidal actions. Our anger must nurture the hearts and minds of our children who must know that we were not okay with this, that we didn’t keep quiet while the most monstrous human atrocities are being carried out in full view of the world.

Don’t feel impotent – don’t give in to ‘there’s nothing I can do that will change this’. Resist. At all times resist the lure of despair. If those in Gaza can still live, can resist, who are we to give up?