(We are not in Gaza)

At first glance there seems to be so many steps; for me, for the lady reading her book across the aisle, the gentleman settled in peaceful reverie gazing out of the window. For all the passengers on this train. So many steps to take, to fall. Seven circles, down and down and down.

I am mildly stressed. Memories of disorganisation, missed trains, travel disasters. These vague and familiar hauntings have come along for the ride. Perhaps the lady opposite has recently received bad news and hides from it in the fat pages of her family saga. Perhaps the gazing man is lonely. The ordinary lows of an ordinary day.

It can get worse. I change trains. A bag of Revels from W H Smiths on the concourse costs three quid. In the dingy waiting room, the extortionately expensive cheese and onion pasty burns my mouth. It is noisy and gloomy. A melancholy man opposite looks into nothing as he absently strokes his phone screen with the back of his finger. Maybe he is trying to decide (a tussle between a broken heart and weary common sense) whether to call, again, an estranged lover. And still, so many steps down.

So many steps between our easy, ordinary, harried, safe day and the day of a family in Gaza whose son, whose brother was burnt to death in a hospital while all the world looked on.

Yet there is only one step. One simple step. One that we, thank the gods, cannot make. It is a mere accident of birth. That boy, and many thousands like him, didn’t have to take any steps into their hell. Though some may have chosen the ragged gestures of resistance that Isreal says makes them an enemy, all it takes, now and in the past, is the simple fact of having been born a Palestinian in Gaza.

The man next to me lounges comfortably, coughs without troubling to lift a hand. Keeping my elbow clamped to my side, away from the intruding spill of him, I reach for my coffee. A spillage burns my leg. I am tired. I couldn’t get to sleep last night because this terrible news, this live-screened genocide filled me with such torment and misery. The helplessness, the lack of any sense of what to do. The vile passivity of watching it unfold.

The howling horror of it. Gaza, Congo, Sudan.

What do we do? What gestures can we salvage from beneath the proclamations of a government that will only ‘urge restraint’ whilst pompously, cravenly, intoning Israel’s right to ‘defend’ itself.

How dare you speak for me, for the British people, with your limp, death-wish words. How dare you.

When this time is done we will need new coinage. We will need to find replacements for the words restraint and defend, so fully have these two lost their meaning.

And yet this day, for me is a good one. I am taking a lucky journey. Tears for another, however genuine the cause, do nothing to help. It is not my own humanity that needs exercise or exhibition. I have to find something, some pathetic little levers. Perhaps all of us pulling small levers will make change.

Now social media has ruthlessly pared away any scrap of attention that does not pertain directly to itself, fundraising no longer seems to work. So I am starting a monthly donation to Mecical Aid for Palestin, a small tax on the work I sell.

And I am paying attention to the BDS Movement. It stands for:

Boycott

Divest

Sanction

This was a tactic that had an impact during the South African apartheid era and surely will do something against this new (and shockingly old) apartheid. Of course there are Israelis who don’t deserve the censure, just as there were South Africans.

But this is where we are.

I cannot, under the cloak of my blessings, the shade of my feeble government, the incomparably easy weight of my every day cares, simply watch as children die, as families are hideously bereaved. People who in another world might sit next to me on a train, are savagely exterminated. I cannot just keep watching, keep feeding horror to helplessness.

So I’ll try pulling those little levers, knowing it is not enough. That is where I am. And it is no answer. But it is all I have.