Burned-out vehicles at Moshav Tkuma last September, 2024. A temporary memorial site for the squatter's colony. Photo: Ilan Assayag/Haaretz.
By Caitlin Johnstone – Sep 30, 2025
It won’t work, though. We’ve seen too much. What has been seen cannot be unseen.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
‘Israel’ apologists are probably going to make a much, much bigger deal about the second October 7 anniversary than they did about the first anniversary, because they kind of have to. The world is turning against ‘Israel’ in unprecedented ways in 2025, and yelling about October 7 is all they’ve got left.
They’ve already got a scripted October 7 series coming out on Paramount+, and another, separate scripted October 7 series coming out on HBO Max for the anniversary. There are probably numerous news media segments and articles scheduled. Maybe some new “revelations” about alleged October 7 atrocities which have been just waiting in the wings this whole time for some reason.
The hasbarists are going to be so obnoxious. They’ll be babbling about Hamas beheading babies and then cooking the beheaded babies in the oven and then having sex with the beheaded babies and then eating the beheaded babies and then playing soccer with the baby heads while singing about how much they love Adolf Hitler.
They’ll need to do this, because what else do they have? All the attention has long ago moved from October 7 to the genocide in Gaza, because ‘Israel’ is the victimizer in literally every news story that’s come out about Palestine since that one day. Every relevant humanitarian institution on earth is saying that ‘Israel’ is committing genocide and starving civilians, and we’ve been watching the evidence of this on our screens for two years.
In 2023 you had westerners saying “How could Hamas do such a thing??”, but in 2025 everyone’s looking back and going “Ehh, I kinda get it.” There are only so many horrific atrocities you can witness before you stop seeing Israel as the poor widdle Bambi-eyed victim. There are only so many times you can hear ‘Israeli officials’ stating their plans to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of all Palestinians, only so many ‘Israeli soldiers’ you can see mockingly dressed in the undergarments of the dead and displaced Palestinian women they’ve been genociding, only so many hospital bombings you can read about, only so many accounts of IDF troops massacring starving civilians at aid sites you can listen to, before you start thinking to yourself that ‘Israel’ probably had it coming.
So they’ve got to try and reignite that initial shock and horror ‘Israel’s’ western allies experienced on October 7, using whatever tools of emotional manipulation they can. Try to take us all by the hand and lead us back to that naive time when the mainstream narrative was that ‘Israel’ had just been attacked by a bunch of hateful savages who wanted to murder Jews simply because they are Jewish.
It won’t work, though. We’ve seen too much. What has been seen cannot be unseen. No matter how much they moan about October 7, no matter how much control they shore up over TikTok and other social media platforms to silence criticism of ‘Israel,’ no matter how loudly they concern troll about a pretend epidemic of antisemitism, what has been seen will never be unseen.
We see what ‘Israel’ is. We see what ‘Israel’ is doing. We see what the western governments who support ‘Israel’ are. There is nothing anyone can say or do that will cause us to unsee what we have seen and un-know what we now know.
And we will never, ever forgive them.
Caitlin Johnstone
Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.
