There’s a song lyric that’s been in my head for the last few days: “If you tolerate this, then your children will be next” by Welsh band Manic Street Preachers.

The title is a reference to a 1930s Spanish Republican poster featuring a photo of a child who had been murdered by Franco’s forces. The poster was meant to recruit people in the UK to help Spanish Republicans resist the fascists who were killing and torturing their people. “If you tolerate this, your children will be next,” the poster warns in block letters beneath the photo.

This week, the Zionist state that occupies Palestine bombed at least seven residential high-rise buildings in Gaza, as part of their escalating campaign of genocide. I don’t know how anyone can watch the footage of these buildings imploding, sending massive plumes of dust outward to the surrounding refugee camps, and not make the obvious associative connections. And yet there will be no flags flown at half mast, no statements of mourning from heads of state around the world. Despite the fact that this week alone, the Zionist state has killed at least 500 Palestinians and injured 2,300.

Last week, a Mexican man named Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas died in ICE custody. He was the 14th person to die in ICE custody this year.

This week also, The Guardian printed a story about a man from Chicago, Daniel Raab, who joined the IOF as a sniper and shot unarmed Palestinians in Gaza, basically for his own amusement. In a chilling exchange, he describes his indifference about sniping 19 year old Salem Doghmosh as he tried to retrieve the body of his older brother Mohammed. “It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”

The song keeps repeating in my head.

I have also been thinking of the examples of people —at the individual and community level — refusing to tolerate this. How Los Angeles has been consistently resisting ICE terror and kidnappings. The neighborhood defense groups that have organized to document ICE presence and sometimes even chase them away. Los Angeles— especially the Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian communities here— has a deep history of resistance to state violence, and established organizing structures that prepared these communities to agitate against Trump’s vigilante militia.

I think the work required of us is that of refusal. We are told to tolerate rising authoritarianism, genocide, and the slow death of structural inequality. We are disciplined into tolerating these injustices. We are being disciplined into accepting very specific definitions of “political violence.” We are learning whose deaths should stop the world and whose deaths are just part of the world turning. But we don’t have to accept that.

Must reads

How to feel slightly less helpless by Maura Finkelstein
Refusing to name the final solution in Gaza by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Policy can’t save a propaganda problem by Peter Shamshiri
We must not posthumously sanitize Charlie Kirk’s hateful life by Erin Reed