Which, alas, overshadowed Israel’s violations of the ceasefire and the killing of 103 Palestinians since the war’s halt. But it doesn’t, it cannot, obscure Israel’s loud instructions to UNRWA, the UN agency that has long led aid efforts to Palestinian refugees, to vacate Israel-Palestine.

Remarkably, all that I cite above transpires as Western elites, with a very heavy heart, ask the time-honored questions they’ve been asking themselves diligently since the end of World War II: how could they have remained silent in the face of Nazism’s extermination machine? How could they turn away Jewish refugees in their dire need?

While these elites ponder the obvious answers, which for some reason remain curiously elusive to them, the Swiss authorities let into Zurich Arab-American Ali Abunimah, Executive Director of Electronic Intifada, an intrepid Palestine focused news platform, only for plainclothes policemen to arrest him on the street in broad daylight, haul him into an unmarked car, take him to an unknown location, detain him for three days, have him questioned by defense ministry intelligence agents, and then deport him to Turkey.

The Swiss, by such prejudicial and extralegal actions, are not outliers in Europe. There are today curbs and proscriptions that are exclusively deployed against Palestine’s advocates in far too many of that continent’s countries.

We have long felt orphaned in this Levantine neighborhood. All of us, of all stripes. Except for a brief moment of possibilities after our so-called independence in the middle of the last century, we’ve been struggling to carve for ourselves paths out of endless quandaries and chasms, some of them, needless to say, self-inflicted. Even those of us who have long believed in certain Western notions of equity, freedom, and fairness understood that they came with a healthy dose of old colonial prejudices, run-of-the mill bigotries, and present-day hypocrisies, especially when it came to Israel. But the current extravaganza of chauvinism and malevolence is leaving us quite stunned at the abandon with which the West has risked its entire edifice of laws, norms, and human empathy.

For what? For a supremacist state whose raison d’être is largely based on the atrocities historically committed against its people by this same West. I could be wrong, but I’d like to hazard that this irony is the most unbearable of them all.

It pays to dedicate much thought to the reasons for this degradation in behavior, among them, as Peter Harling writes in Le Monde Diplomatique, is that the West “is in the throes of a paranoid withdrawal; universalism has been traded for petty provincialism. Many of its societies are clamouring for police and security, celebrating masculinity, scapegoating foreigners and fearing some enemy at home.” It recalls all that jingoism of yesteryears. Reliably cyclical, this descent into petty hatreds, except the targets’ identities keep conveniently changing.

If this day were a movie, it would be epic. Its mood would be the stuff of poetry, its anchor heartbreak. Its plot would unfold in disparate and yet tightly knit enactments. A single shot, a face, a moment of silence or hell, or one with words to remember, would capture the majestic event that swept them into the camera’s lens and its verdict. The images would be beautiful and ugly, the people so very grand and so pitifully small, the pace slow, too slow at times, and then breathlessly fast. The entirety of it would be maddeningly incomprehensible, the finale frustratingly turbid.

We, the people, would be sitting there mesmerized, desperate for respite, for the movie to end–– and to run forever.