BillyvonBismarck

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

My out of office message:

The past two years have been marked by an accumulation of losses. Loved ones. Colleagues. Friends. People deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli army. I learned that grief does not arrive as a sequence of discrete events; it accrues. It settles into my body until I start to wonder not only what has been lost, but what remains.

There are moments when I suspect I have lost some part of my own humanity simply by witnessing so much death. I have watched people die in front of me in ways that resist description. I have lived inside a genocide as it unfolded, and I have watched another continue in Gaza, mediated through the relentless images on a tiny screen in my pocket that refuses to yield. The 24 hour image has dissolved the boundary between proximity and spectatorship. We can leave the scene, but the scene does not leave us.

Some images insist on permanence. On more than one occasion, I have watched paramedics carry bags containing the dismembered remains of children. There are sights that do not become memories because they never cease to be present. They have reorganized my inner life.

How much grief can a human being contain before it alters the architecture of the self?

I have been chased by a Merkava tank. A grenade has been thrown at me. Israeli quadcopters have circled overhead as instruments of intimidation. Sound bombs have become part of the atmosphere. Israeli snipers have opened fire on me eight times, most recently last Monday, while a group of us filmed the demolition of homes in Haddatha. Survival, repeated often enough stops feeling like triumph and just, almost mundanely, becomes another condition of witnessing.

This week brought another loss, one I had neither anticipated nor prepared myself to absorb. Its force has surprised me. Maybe grief does not become easier through repetition. Maybe each loss discovers a new vulnerability. For the next few days, I will step away from the field. Not because the work has become less necessary, but because mourning, too, demands its own uncompromising attention. My heart is in pieces.

آخر سنتين من حياتي كانوا تراكم مستمر للخسارات. أحبّة. زملاء. أصحاب. ناس انقصفوا وانقتلوا عن قصد على إيد الجيش الإسرائيلي. تعلّمت إنو الحزن ما بيجي كحادثة وحدة بتنتهي. بيتراكم. بيسكن بالجسد، لدرجة إنك بتبلّش تتساءل مش بس شو اللي خسرته، بل شو اللي بعده باقي منك.

في لحظات بحسّ إنّي خسرت جزء من إنسانيتي، بس لأنّي شهدت كل هالقدر من الموت. شفت ناس يموتوا قدّامي بطرق ما بتوصفها الكلمات. عشت على مقربة من إبادة جماعية وهي عم تصير، وشفت إبادة تانية مستمرّة بغزة، منقولة إليّ عبر شاشة ما بتطفي، شاشة ما بتترك مجال لوهم إنو في مسافة بتحميك. الصورة المستمرة على مدار أربع وعشرين ساعة ألغت الفرق بين إنك تكون قريب من الحدث أو مجرد متفرّج عليه. فيك تترك المكان، بس المكان ما بيتركك.

في صور بتفرض حالها إلى الأبد. أكتر من مرة شفت مسعفين حاملين أكياس فيها أشلاء أطفال. في مشاهد ما بتتحوّل إلى ذكريات، لأنّها ما بتغيب أصلًا. بتضلّ حاضرة، وبتعيد ترتيب العالم اللي جوّاتك.

قدّيش في إنسان يتحمّل حزن قبل ما يغيّر الحزن شكل روحه؟

ركضت قدّام دبابة ميركافا وهي عم تلاحقني. انرمت عليّ قنبلة. طائرات الكوادكوبتر الإسرائيلية ظلّت تحوم فوق راسي كوسيلة ترهيب. القنابل الصوتية صارت جزء من الهواء اللي منتنفّسه. والقنّاصة الإسرائيليون أطلقوا النار عليّ ثماني مرات، آخرها الاثنين الماضي، بينما كنّا مجموعة منّا عم نصوّر هدم البيوت بحَدّاثا. لما البقاء على قيد الحياة بيتكرّر مرارًا، ما بعود يُشبه الانتصار. بيصير مجرد شرط إضافي من شروط الشهادة على ما يجري.

وهالأسبوع حمل خسارة جديدة، خسارة ما كنت متوقّعها، ولا كنت مهيّأ استوعبها. وقعها عليّ كان أقسى ممّا تصوّرت. يمكن الحزن ما بيصير أخفّ مع التكرار. ويمكن كل خسارة بتكتشف نقطة ضعف جديدة فينا. لهيك رح ابتعد عن الميدان كم يوم، مش لأنّ الشغل صار أقلّ ضرورة، بل لأنّ الحداد، هو كمان، بيطالب بحقه الكامل، ومن دون أي مساومة.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@junwinhui @academic_la Please stop with the bed wetting. It was a tough game alright, but not a dirty one. Did you expect Paraguay to sit back and admire France?! It was a proper world cup clash. Best of luck to France going forward.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@PressedOnGarvey @GeorgeSzamuely @georgegalloway Ok vatnik

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@PressedOnGarvey @GeorgeSzamuely @georgegalloway Ok, vatnik

[Tancredi Palmeri @tancredipalmeri]

Holy shit.

Maradona in 2018 on the day the World Cup 2026 was awarded to USA, Mexico and Canada, goes on saying:

“They will do 4 quarters of the game instead of two halves so to put commercials, you’ll see”

[Petre Solheim @PetreSolheim]

@BillAckman Imagine your family worked for a generation to save money to start a slave plantation in Georgia. You thought this would generate a steady stream of income for your family for generations. Then some damn communists come along, free the slaves, and distribute your land to them!

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The American worker has been told, for fifty years, that his enemy is:

The immigrant taking his job.

The welfare recipient taking his taxes.

The foreign country taking his factory.

The liberal elite taking his culture.

The woke movement taking his children.

He has not been told that in 1978 the average CEO made 30 times the average worker's salary.

That today that number is 350 times.

That this did not happen by accident.

That it happened through specific policy decisions made by specific people with specific interests, enacted through a political system that those people fund.

He has not been told that because the people who decide what he's told are the people who benefited from those decisions.

The enemy was always upward.

The propaganda has always pointed sideways.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@JoeyMannarino Stay in your lane.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@DrewPavlou Absolute clown. Grow up.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@Sourbake2 @BeattieDoug @IrelandsFuture @eugenereid That is absolute nonsense. You're gurning about dual language street signs. This island, which we share, has a Gaelic and Catholic identity and also an Anglo, Protestant identity. It's home for all of the above.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@afneil There's always a tweet...

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@johnkonrad @Nick_Danger_14 @Keir_Starmer Well, at least you recognise the need for legal immunity for what is otherwise murder by most people.

[TheBossRoss 🇪🇺 🧶 ❄ 📷 6x💉 @BettinaSRoss1]

Hannah Arendt.

Listen carefully.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@antisemitism @simon_schama I am genuinely grateful that I now know about something of which I was previously unaware. But you know who was also born in Baghdad? Avi Shlaim. Wonder what he has to say on current mass killings in Gaza.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@simon_schama The Great Sinner.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@SimonCatRiley @davidadams10 Well said sir.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

This is Tyre in South Lebanon today.

Israel is leveling entire civilian neighborhoods in one of the most intense bombardments yet.

One of humanity’s oldest cities.

Is being systematically wiped out.

And not a peep from the complicit international community, of course.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@davidadams10 100%. And his views are little more than a recipe for continued pain, hurt and loss.

[BillyvonBismarck @BillyvonB]

@davidadams10 Agreed "Paul" was depressing. If he had been talking about his historical experiences that would be one thing. But his present views - and possible dark forebodings about the future - are frankly sick.