I have been looking for words for over a month.

Audre Lorde’s exhortation on the tyranny of silence continued to resonate in my ears as, for all these days, I tried to come to terms with my inability to articulate rage and tribulation, with incredulity and with the feeling of being lost, with the impression that humanity has reached a point of no return.

Nothing will ever be the same.

I hope that the horror of the past few weeks will stay with us as a fire mark of shame that will forever prevent us to forget and will force us to decide who we want to be, where we want to stand, what we want to teach to our children, where shall we find the courage to look at ourselves in the mirror every morning.

Nothing can ever be the same. Certain images – their meaning, their pain, their consequences – should never be deleted from the individual and ancestral memory that humanity transmits across generations.

A father who collects the remains of his children killed by bombs in garbage bags.

Premature babies who die because the hospitals infrastructures have been destroyed and there’s no electricity to power incubators. The survivors who scream under the rubbles. The stench of mass graves.

What does it mean for a mother to write the name on the body of her child, so it won’t be an unidentified corpse or an nameless orphan or an anonymous digit in mass statistics? Where did that hand find the strength to write that name?

I write and I feel sick to my stomach.

We are at a point of no return. We are at a day of reckoning with ourselves and with those around us. Those who chose not take a stance are accomplices.

There are no innocent observers.

Let us then gather around those who find the courage to resist. Let us regroup. Let us support each other as a community. Let us listen to the discomfort, the fear, the anguish of those who are close to us and struggle to find the words for it. In this moment of no return, it is clear who stays in our life and who doesn’t – you are either on one side or on the other. Indifference is a choice – and it is a criminal one.

Solidarity is costly, it is tiring and requires running risks. Let us celebrate the courage of those who chose to run these risks – let us not miss an opportunity to offer a word of support: in the midst of so much horror, kindness can still help building little bridges, can help us feel a little less lonely and less lost in the face of the decay of humanity.

I read somewhere that resistance is the highest form of love. Let us then resist together, as a final act of redemption. Let us support each other in reclaiming the right to self-determination.

The objective is not a ceasefire. The objective is the end of occupation, the end of abuses, the end of the monopoly of victimhood that allows Israel to commit abominable atrocities.

The objective is that with the liberation of Palestine we shall collectively achieve the liberation of a sense of humanity that is now buried under the rubbles of the hospitals in Gaza.