It’s day 293 of the Israeli military’s relentless assault on Gaza. The day after Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress – hundreds of Jewish activists arrested in a civil disobedience action in the Capitol, thousands protesting in the streets. And nothing is changing in Gaza. Just five days after the International Court of Justice ruled that not just this current scorched-earth assault on Gaza, but the entire infrastructure of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and lives is an apartheid system and illegal. And nothing is changing in Gaza.
The images on my feed are as graphic and horrific as they have been every day for the past nine and a half months: mothers wailing over the bodies of their dead children, fathers frantically scrambling through rubble, pulling out dusty bodies of loved ones. Now it’s children with scabies, with rashes, with crippling abdominal pain from drinking bad water for months on end. Families frantically running through the streets with the sounds of bombing behind them, holding only bedrolls, looking for a place, any place, to be able to lay their heads and not be crushed under bombs.
And though I know that there are people living their lives here in the US without watching these images, I do not fully understand it. We have all seen the images of the emaciated prisoners released from Auschwitz when US and British troops came to open the prison doors at last. So why can we not, now, stomach the images of emaciated Palestinian prisoners being released from Sde Teiman – a prison camp that will go down in history as the extermination camp for Palestinian people. This prison camp in the Negev desert will be remembered as the place where tens of thousands of Palestinians were held and tortured and starved for months, and many did not survive. Sde Teiman will be written about in history books – and unlike in Germany, where the neighbors to the extermination camps had to shut their eyes and ears and noses to ignore the death camp next door, in this case, we are all neighbors/witnesses to the horrors of Sde Teiman, if we choose to open our eyes and see. This is unfolding real-time, right before our eyes, but those who call it genocide are pooh-poohed as over-reacting (how can it be genocide when only 40,000 are dead? Only 15,000 children …. not six million like World War II). We who share our humanity with the people of Palestine, who see these suffering children, women, men and can relate to them as sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons – we are dismissed and called supporters of terrorists – simply because we see Palestinians as our fellow human beings.
Apparently we are supposed to see Palestinians as animals – as ‘human animals’, as Trump’s latest endorser, Itamar Ben Gvir, called them back in October. But I cannot do that. I look into the eyes of the children in Gaza and I see my own child. I look into the face of the elders there, and I see my own grandmother. How can you not? And how can we, as a society, continue to allow this to happen – day after day after day after excruciating day? How can we go on living our lives as if this is not going on? As if this horror is not being funded with our tax money? As if our settler-colonial lifestyle of privilege and profit and domination is not the reason that this horror is able to be perpetuated against people who lack that privilege, and who have lived under an oppressive military dictatorship since 1948 with our country’s tacit and explicit support?
So this is my plea to my fellow Americans. If not now, when? If not us, then who will come to the aid of the Palestinian people?
