Israel and Hamas have signed a ceasefire: “we” finally have what we have been chanting for.

So what now? Business as usual? Move on with our lives?

Many people are eager to do so, and many are already doing so.

But this is unacceptable.

So what do we do?

The miserable truth is that the worst kinds of injustice can often not be undone: we cannot raise 100,000 Palestinians back from the death.

How can justice be served when the injustice cannot be undone?

I believe it helps to recognize that this question has been raised many times before, just like the indignation so many of us feel right now, with a renewed intensity, has been felt many times before. This is because the genocide we witnessed is “merely” the most recent episode of a long history of colonial violence and genocide - of injustice that can never be undone.

Recognizing this can help us to straighten our compasses. With renewed insistence, we have to decolinize, which means that we have to …

  1. … address the many ways injustice from the (colonial) past manifests in the present by making sure that those who currently benefit from large-scale historical injustice, compensate those who are currently disadvantaged because of it. In contrast to what bad faith right wing fuckwads would say (“I didn’t do anything, why would I have to pay”), this is not so much a matter of individual responsibility (plenty of people benefit from injustice without being individually responsible for it), but about a matter of making sure, collectively, that crime doesn’t pay.
  2. … try to make sure that it never happens again. However demotivating it can be to work on prevention when so many people are so eager to repeat the ugliest episodes in history, few things are more important than to frustrate the fascist, colonial arsenists.

These are simple, straightforward, easily defensible goals: make sure that crimes do not pay, and try to prevent people from committing them. And these goals apply as much to Israel as to any other violent colonial power.

We can demand that the organizations we work for subscribe to them.

A ceasefire is not enough.