Jamila Levasseur of Waldo is a retired registered nurse.

Going into the third year of Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza, tears and rage replace my words. There are no excuses for the complicity of governments, especially our own, corporate media and the United Nations. No excuses for not recognizing this is genocide, no excuses for hand-wringing with inaction.

I find myself feeling my grandmother’s pain on a gut-wrenching level beyond anything I ever felt before. Watching interviews with Palestinians who recently left Gaza, seeing their anguish about leaving family behind, I now have a deeper understanding of my grandmother, who fled Prague in 1939 with two children but was unable to save her parents.

Desperate to rescue them, she struggled helplessly while they endured multiple displacements. When their letters stopped coming, she endured 18 months of not knowing, hoping they had miraculously survived, before receiving confirmation of their final deportation.

There is no justification for genocide, anywhere, ever.

Oct. 7 must be looked at in context. Surrounded by 140,000 tons of steel fences, shot while trying to fish in the sea, their only airport previously bombed into oblivion, subjected to complete siege since 2007, resistance fighters in Gaza launched a successful break-out on Oct. 7, 2023.

These fighters had lived through multiple wars, seen family members killed, maimed and imprisoned by Israel. They lived with the constant buzzing of drones overhead and the anger of knowing even loved ones’ bodies were held captive, denied the right to decent burial.

The majority were descendants of the 1948 Nakba, made refugees and denied the right of return. They lived their entire lives with the indignities of the siege, denied travel outside of Gaza, surrounded by military and civilian outposts intended to enforce total control of a people who could see, but not return to, their original villages.

Throughout these years, Israel strictly limited their access to water, electricity, fuel, food, medicine and other necessities. Despite this, Palestinians in Gaza maintained high educational standards and exceptional medical teams. They grew as much food as possible. Gaza’s rich history over thousands of years is one of resilience.

It’s taken this unprecedented live-streamed genocide to draw attention to not only how our taxes and weapons enable wholesale destruction, starvation and shredded bodies in Gaza, but also apartheid throughout Occupied Palestine, settler violence against Palestinian farmers and Israel’s biggest land grab in the West Bank since 1967.

Recently, seven Maine state reps were Israel’s guests at the “50 States, One Israel” conference in Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine. There, they were lobbied to pursue legislation prohibiting efforts by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) and to crack down on so-called “antisemitic” speech (i.e., speech critical of Israel).

It’s a serious conflict of interest for a legislator to accept a paid trip from a foreign government intent on influencing their official duties or votes. The Maine reps who accepted this gift in the midst of the current holocaust are cheering on genocide and are not fit to govern.

Photos, seen for the first time, showed piles of corpses and emaciated prisoners after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. My grandmother never forgot those pictures, and the fate of her parents left a wound that never healed.

Today, we see the images in real time. Children burned alive, detainees forced to strip and march, doctors abducted, journalists murdered while holding their cameras, starving fathers shot at so-called “aid” sites, mothers screaming as they gather bits of their children’s flesh, U.S.-made bombs collapsing apartment buildings, schools and hospitals.

The survivors will never erase these images from their minds, and neither should we. Someday this holocaust will end and every war criminal must be prosecuted. We cannot afford to lose hope. Our voices matter.