内容摘要：Several dozen donkeys stand in enclosures at the clinic – some agitatedly kicking their legs, others hungrily tucking into their food. Caregivers and veterinarians move from animal to animal, treating a range of ailments including injuries, colic and eye conditions.

Several dozen donkeys stand in enclosures at the clinic – some agitatedly kicking their legs, others hungrily tucking into their food. Caregivers and veterinarians move from animal to animal, treating a range of ailments including injuries, colic and eye conditions.

“What we’re seeing right now is a struggle between two Zionist elites over who is the greater fascist in different forms,” Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, a professor at Tel Aviv University, said of the political struggles at play within Israel.“On the one hand, there are the Ashkenazi Jews, who settled Israel, imposed the occupation and have killed thousands,” he said of Israel’s traditional military and governing elites, many of whom might describe themselves as liberal and democratic, and were originally from central and Eastern Europe. “Or [you have] the current religious Zionists, like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who [the old Ashkenazi elite] now accuse of being fascists.

“You can’t reduce this to left and right. I don’t buy into that,” Shenhav-Shahrabani said. “It goes deeper. Both sides are oblivious to the genocide in Gaza.”While resistance against the war has grown both at home and abroad, so too has the intensity of the attacks being protested against.Since Israel unilaterally broke a

almost 4,000 Palestinianshave been killed, hundreds of them children. In addition, a siege, imposed upon the decimated

has pushed what remains of its pre-war population of more than two million to the point of famine, international agencies, including the United Nations, have warned.

At the same time as Israel’s war on Gaza has intensified, so too have its actions in the West Bank. Under the guise of another military operation, the Israeli army has occupied and levelled large parts of the occupied territoryI have treated every word of every column that has appeared on this page, devoted to Palestine’s precarious fate and the indefatigable souls who refuse to abandon it, as an obligation and a duty.

It is the obligation and duty of writers – who are privileged to reach so many people in so many places – to expose injustice and give pointed expression to gratuitous suffering.I have made it plain throughout: Here I stand. Not because I am the all-knowing arbiter of right from wrong – any honest writer is aware of how exhausting and foolish that can be – but because I am obliged to tell the truth clearly and, if need be, repeatedly.

I consider ending what has happened and continues to happen to Palestinians to be the moral imperative of this awful, disfiguring hour.It requires a response since silence often translates – consciously or by neglect – into consent and complicity.