The Doomsday Clock & Silence on Gaza
Why only vague references to the "Middle East"?
Scientists and journalists responsible for warning us of doomsday can’t utter the word “Palestine” or “Gaza”. If you aren’t familiar with the Doomsday Clock, it is a tool that a league of renown scientists and journalists crafted to demonstrate how close humankind moves toward complete eradication of the planet. Originally the Clock was made just 2 years after the development of the Manhattan Project which used Nazi science to create the first nuclear weapons.
In January this year, the Doomsday Clock was moved one second closer to midnight, putting it at 89 seconds away. Midnight is the metaphorical doomsday used for the device. In their YouTube video, they talked about everything from climate change to the speech that Hiroshima bomb survivor Toshiyuki Mimaki gave after winning the Nobel prize. Toshiyuki Mimaki himself brought up the landscape of Gaza, and took the opportunity to remind everyone that Gaza looks like Hiroshima after the historic bombing. He stated “In Gaza, bleeding children are being held by their parents. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago.”
Through the entire Doomsday Clock’s site and YouTube video on the matter only vague references to the “Middle East” and “Russia-Ukraine” conflicts can be found. The US Military alongside all its proxies, including Israel, remain the worlds biggest polluters. Not to mention that Israeli aggression towards Iran, Yemen, and the rest of the Arab world are the primary and principle issue in the Middle East.
Additionally, the US engages in proxy wars with Russia through the Middle East and continues to escalate by tempting Iran with nuclear war. Our planet is damned as a result of two settler colonies— a father and son; the United States of America and Israel. The inception of the former lead to the invention of the latter. Ironically, the Clock’s timeline is directly connected to the inception of Israel. Israel was officially established in 1948 and the Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign of Palestine to establish the settlement began in 1947. These Nazi scientists pushed their Jewish population to their limit during the Holocaust, and the cycle of violence thus reproduced upon the Palestinian indigenous peoples. And that year, the year of the Nakba, the Clock was established.
I am a student. Not a journalist nor a scientist. I write because our scientists, journalists, media, and governments have failed to address the causes of the extreme damage of the world we are set to inherit. It is an act of unimaginable negligence not to tell the world about the crimes being committed against the people of Palestine as they were to my ancestors, the Indigenous people of the Americas. From an Indigenous academic to the scientists and journalists at the Doomsday Clock, sincerely, fuck you.