On Sunday, 13 July 2025, siblings Karam and Lulu al-Ghussain, aged nine and 10 respectively, went to fetch water for their family from a water distribution site in Gaza. Given the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) much-vaunted proclamations of precision bombing, and that there is no indiscriminate bombing, we can assume that they identified when there were enough people and children in line, before proceeding with the bombing of the site, and dismembering Karam and Lulu.
I began writing this piece on Saturday, 19 July, and during the course of Saturday 32 Palestinians were killed while seeking food and water. On Sunday, 20 July, another 73 Palestinians who had been queueing were killed. By Monday morning that figure had been adjusted upwards to 93 confirmed dead. The pope went so far as to describe the bombing as barbaric.
Much of the aid now being “allowed” into Gaza is being distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American organisation launched in February 2025 with the aim of supplying aid to Gaza. It operates in a small part of Gaza, has no website and has the full support of the Israeli government.
The foundation has been accused of making starvation a bargaining chip and of being a direct accomplice in Israel’s killing and starvation machine. The United Nations has estimated that since the end of May the IDF has killed more than 800 people who were trying to secure food at distribution hubs operated by the foundation. That figure is now well above 1,000.
I would perhaps be somewhat cynical to suggest that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation exists simply to draw children to distribution sites to create an easy target for the IDF bombs. But am I?
The population of Gaza is being systematically starved. And when, in a state of utter desperation, they seek aid, at the only site the IDF has approved, the IDF is then in a position to simply wait for enough people to arrive and to drop a bomb. Every day. Drop a bomb on children every day. Why? Because they can? This is slaughter for sport.
And our response? Mostly silence, save for a few news outlets and intrepid reporters and commentators. How did we get here? How is it that the outrage is not so loud as to drown out everything else?
In attempting an answer, I am going to draw on two books. The first, the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, and the second the truly remarkable Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know by Mark Lilla.
Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher and journalist in the early part of the 20th century. He is most famous for his Prison Notebooks which he wrote during his imprisonment by Mussolini from 1926 until his death in 1937.
Perhaps his most well-known quote is “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”.
This idea of a “time of monsters” refers to what he saw (the period following World War 1) as a time when the old order and old understandings were in a state of collapse. He called this the interregnum (from the Latin, meaning “between reigns”).
In the space created, in the vacuum of social upheaval, is when the monsters emerge to take advantage of the chaos. Hitler in 1930s Germany is, of course, the prototypical example.
It seems incontrovertible that we are living in a time of monsters. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India are all prime examples. And, of course, hovering creepily above all of this is the sociopathic felon and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump.
But the prize for the monster of monsters must surely be Benjamin Netanyahu. A man willing to slaughter tens of thousands of children to stay out of court, and to fulfil his messianic delusion of Israel controlling all the territory from “the river to the sea”.
How did we get to the point where these are the monsters filling the void of power and taking millions along with their brutal lies?
We now live in a world where millions of people believe that vaccines cause autism; where the habitual liar Trump is seen as a visionary leader; where climate breakdown is for many people a hoax; where the head of health in the US, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, does not believe that HIV causes Aids and believes that the Covid vaccines were developed to control people via microchips; and where Edgar Maddison Welch was so convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizza restaurant that he fired shots at the pizzeria using an assault-like AR-15 rifle in an attempt to “save” the children, eventually serving four years in jail.
Lilla, in Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, offers a potential answer as to why so many people stubbornly refuse to see the world as it is, rather holding tightly onto some kind of self-delusion.
He writes: “We willingly give up a shot to acquire true beliefs about the world out of fear that truths about ourselves will be exposed in the process, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than that it is ours. It doesn’t matter that reliance on false opinion is the worst sort of dependence. It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.”
Lilla argues that the more difficult the truth we have to face, the more we are likely to lie to ourselves.
Imagine having to face the truth that we watched as one of the most powerful armies in the world (with the open support of the most powerful one) bombed and slaughtered a classroom full of children (27 of them) every day for 653 days. Every day for 653 days.
We saw it happening and we denied, rationalised, pontificated, lied, fudged, and ultimately did nothing.
No wonder there is so much solace and bliss to be found in ignorance. DM