The Israeli government lobbed a symbolic bomb into a group of starving and desperate Palestinians yesterday. The day started with the news of throngs of hungry Palestinians, ostensibly lured into an area (promising food) and then shot, bombed, and run over by retreating vehicles when the plan went awry. The lure was not a promise of safe travel or a ceasefire; it was food, not enough to feed the masses but enough to fight for. When the chaos that anyone with half a brain could predict happened, the Israel Defense Forces used the ensuing melee to justify the killing of 104 civilians, at last count, and the wounding of hundreds. The import of this is that it happened about three days before a ceasefire agreement—on the hopper, had a chance for fruition.
Over the next day or two, the requisite statements of investigations into the atrocity and remorse will be repeated on the cable news show into the Sunday gabfests. I fear the upshot will be no ceasefire. Instead, we will get more of the disgusting same, the continued holding of hostages by Hamas and nightly video of broken and bleeding bodies on the floors of what used to be functioning hospitals in Gaza. President Joe Biden warned his Israeli counterpart soon after October 7 of making the same mistakes of America after 9/11, losing public support and the moral high ground. In response to Netanyahu’s staunch pushback, ‘“You carpet-bombed Germany, you dropped the atom bomb, a lot of civilians died,”’ said Netanyahu. Mr. Biden countered, “Yeah, that's why all these institutions were set up after World War Two to see to it that it didn't happen again ... don't make the same mistakes we made in 9/11. There's no reason why we had to be in a war in Afghanistan.”
With his [Trump] apparent affinity for dictators and despots, it is not beyond reason Netanyahu is working against a ceasefire and, like the Republicans in Congress—on the border, is working in concert with Donald Trump to get him back in the White House. I do not believe it is a stretch to think that Donald Trump would allow Netanyahu to carpet bomb Gaza off the face of the Earth. While the Republicans in Congress and the Courts dither with the integrity and safety of our freedoms and kids—who could be defending a NATO country in a ground war, the Israeli right-wing is close to losing the support of lifelong defenders like me, for the entire nation. After yesterday’s attack on innocents, many of whom have been reduced to scrounging for food and medicine, one cannot help but have their loyalties challenged.
I am old enough to remember the support from Jews in the Civil Rights movement. For years, I have resisted my friends and colleagues who have shouted about genocide and apartheid when it comes to Israel’s right-wing policy toward the Palestinians. The solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict is complex, but what is simple is that every nation deserves freedom as a human right. That does not exclude people surviving repressive regimes from within, like the Palestinians, from not having the same rights. Few would argue that Hamas and its leaders are not terrorists robbing their people of resources so that they might live extravagantly in places like Qatar. Just as we have to separate the free people of Israel from its right-wing leadership, the same situation is true for Palestine.
Hamas has indeed been inexplicably elected as the representative government of Gaza, but some would argue that Netanyahu's brutality can be characterized as terror as well. Playing tit for tat is a useless exercise when women, children, and the elderly are the innocent pawns. Most of the civilized world reacted with righteous anger after the heinous attack in Israel on October 7 by Hamas. Reports and concrete evidence of burned babies and parents and children slaughtered in each other’s presence sent shivers down the spine of morality. Collectively, just like after 9/11, the world said go get ‘em. Until logic overtakes anger, the intervening time is why there are rules of engagement in war. Some of you may not remember the My Lai Massacre. The men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, led by Lieutenant William Calley, slaughtered a village of more than 300 unarmed civilians made up of women, children, and the elderly in Vietnam. That massacre became a seminal moment for resistance to the Vietnam War. When the details were revealed, the young people finally said no more. Members of the National Guard gunned down American college kids at Jackson State University and Kent State University. Slaughter is not a byproduct of war; it is a feature. As horrific as those incidents were, there were Americans who still supported the actions of the American government. For them, the residents of My Lai were guilty of being Vietnamese, and the Jackson State and Kent State students were guilty of being right.
Will the killings of civilians in Gaza City yesterday become the latest My Lai, or will it be chewed up and spit out like a useless piece of cud? History is like a pebble dropped in a pond. The ripple never goes away; it only spreads. If Benjamin Netanyahu is not careful, the ripple pattern of the world’s abandonment will wash up on the shores of Israel like a tidal wave.
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