"When we see a Doctors Without Borders video of a 9-year-old boy having his foot amputated on a Gaza hospital floor, without adequate anesthesia, as his sister looks and waits for her own surgery, how can we not feel the same revulsion we felt watching Hamas videos of attacks on Israelis?"- Nicholas Kristof, 'What Happens When We Lose Sight of Our Shared Humanity', NY Times
Even as the Gaza humanitarian disaster spirals further out of control, other voices have weighed in, to draw the world's attention to the ongoing depredation, chaos, bloodshed. Some of them are included below:
Israel uses World War II rhetoric to justify Gaza war - The Washington Post
Excerpt:
The repeated mention of World War II and the Holocaust in the context of the Gaza war has prompted criticism. “The yellow patch symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people and being at the mercy of others,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, wrote on social media Tuesday in response to Erdan’s wearing of the star. “Today we have an independent country and a strong army.”
Given the pivotal importance of the Holocaust in Israeli history, it is not surprising that the events of Oct. 7 are spoken of in a similar light. Many Israelis are also reasonably upset that much of the international community has moved on from the violence of that day so quickly. But that doesn’t necessarily make it an apt comparison, Michael Berenbaum of American Jewish University in California told the Times of Israel this week.
“The apt description of what happened is a pogrom, the massacre of Jews, women and children, not just men and the rape of women, the wanton destruction of property, the violation of homes while the government looked away,”
by Robert Reich | October 30, 2023 - 6:27am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
The warfare in Gaza is calamitous and heartbreaking.
But many of the things I hear or read about it from otherwise intelligent people strike me as blind to its realities. For example:
“Gazans are unfortunate collateral damage.”
I heard this today from an Israeli official. This view is morally bankrupt. Innocent children, parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters are not “collateral damage.” Their lives are no less valuable than any other lives. Their deaths and suffering add to the deaths and suffering of everyone.
“Jews should be ashamed.”
I heard this yesterday from a so-called “expert” on the Middle East. It’s an absurd and antisemitic remark. Even if you condemn the decisions of the Israeli government that have led to this cataclysm (as I do), assigning complicity to all Jews is morally repugnant.
“No one should hire any student who blames Israel.”
I heard this from a titan of Wall Street. It’s outrageous. Students should be free to express their views, even if you believe them misguided. Harming their careers because of the views they express when at college is a form of blacklisting akin to the worst of Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts. Wealthy donors from Wall Street and C-suites who seek to silence young people are morally wrong.
“I won’t vote for Biden because of his support for Israel.”
A young progressive activist told me this yesterday. I told her she has a right to vote for whomever she wishes, of course, but that a vote withheld from Biden will in effect be a vote for Trump. And no matter how much she disagrees with Biden’s support for Israel in the present conflict, Trump’s foreign policies will be far worse — giving authoritarian tyrants whatever they want.
“Israel has no choice.”
I heard this from a graduate student who specializes in the Middle East and says a ground invasion of Gaza is the only way to destroy Hamas. I think he’s wrong. Israel is wealthy and powerful. It has other ways to contain Hamas. The ground invasion will not destroy Hamas — it may even enlarge it, as more Gazans and other Palestinians are radicalized by it.
Israel can invest more and better in intelligence about Hamas (its intelligence failures in the current crisis are mind-blowing). It can infiltrate Hamas and destroy its leadership. It can work with other Arab states to isolate Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s other terrorist clients.
I fear that the choice Israel is now pursuing — a ground war in Gaza — is exactly what Hamas hoped for when it launched its October 7 assault, because it is undermining whatever sympathy Israel had, deflecting world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran, and forcing Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.
by Jeffrey D. Sachs | November 1, 2023 - 5:40am | permalink
Israel is running out of time to save itself—not from Hamas, which lacks the means to defeat Israel militarily, but from itself. Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, verging on the crime of genocide according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, threaten to destroy Israel’s civil, political, economic, and cultural relations with the rest of the world. There are growing calls in Israel for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign immediately. A new Israeli government should seize the opportunity to turn carnage into lasting peace through diplomacy.
Netanyahu is leading Israel into the same trap that the U.S. fell into after 9/11. Hamas’ goal in its heinous terrorist attack on 10/7 was to goad Israel into a long and bloody war, and to induce Israel to commit war crimes to bring on the world’s opprobrium. This is a classic political use of terror: not merely to kill, but to frighten, provoke, debase, and ultimately undermine, the foe.
Al-Qaeda, the perpetrator of 9/11, goaded America’s political class to launch disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. The result was carnage, torture by U.S. agencies and military forces, $8 trillion in debt, and the collapse of U.S. prestige and power worldwide. Hamas is similarly goading Israel into war crimes and potentially into a region-wide war. Israel’s actions are turning Israel’s friends around the world against it.
Israel’s instinct is to ignore global opinion, chalking it up to anti-Semitism and believing that the U.S. has Israel’s back. Yet the U.S., weakened as it is in world affairs, can’t possibly save Israel from itself. Just look at how the U.S. is “saving” Ukraine. Ukraine is being destroyed by its pursuit of NATO membership and rejection of diplomacy, both of which have been encouraged by America’s ineffective pledge to support Ukraine militarily “for as long as it takes.”
There is another deep similarity of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 and Hamas’s 10/7. Al-Qaeda was a U.S. creation that later boomeranged. By covertly funding Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union during the 1980s, the CIA effectively launched al-Qaeda. In the case of Hamas, Netanyahu—as is well-documented—secretly backed Hamas in order to divide and weaken the Palestinian Authority.
Israelis are told by Netanyahu and his cabinet that there is no alternative to achieve security and peace other than to invade Gaza to defeat Hamas. The acquiescence of the U.S. and European governments as Israel invades Gaza conveys the message to the Israeli people that their leaders are telling the truth: that Hamas can be defeated militarily, that the civilian deaths in Gaza are being limited by careful targeting of military operations, and that Israel is doing the only thing it can do for its own security. Yet these misguided views are perpetrated by the same political class that let Israel’s guard down in the lead-up to 10/7. Israeli leaders are seeking to cover up their blunders through the war in Gaza.
by Cynthia Kaufman | November 2, 2023 - 5:54am | permalink
Bombing or killing civilians is wrong. That is true whether you have been suffering under an occupation for over half a century. And it is wrong if you are retaliating for your people being murdered.
It has been heartbreaking for me how that basic principle has been so hard for people to hold onto in the current battle between Hamas and the Israeli government.
United National Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, 120 countries in the United Nations General Assembly and many human rights organizations are all calling for an immediate ceasefire.
Civilians are being murdered in Gaza while Hamas hides in tunnels. Israeli civilian hostages remain captive while their government prioritizes destroying Hamas over working for the freedom of those hostages.
House Resolution 786 calls for an immediate Ceasefire in Gaza. My member of the House, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), has declined to sign HR 786 arguing that it allows for Hamas impunity. Out of alignment with most of the rest of the world, the U.S. government is supporting and arming Israel while only quietly asking them to minimize civilian deaths.
While much of the mainstream in the U.S. continues its unwavering support for the brutal acts of the Israeli government, some on the left appear, mostly through silence, to overlook the brutal acts of Hamas.
Those of us on the U.S. left need to call for an immediate ceasefire and we need to speak out against those on both sides who favor murdering civilians. I am following Naomi Klein’s imperative to “side with the children over the guns.”
by Robert C. Koehler | November 4, 2023 - 5:46am | permalink
We—by which I mean most of humanity—are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.
You know, violence is morally neutral—and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers. Make the world a better place.
Just war theory makes the world numb to human slaughter. Dead children, and all other innocent victims, become abstractions, collateral damage. It’s almost as though the role of lone-nut mass murderers—killers who clearly have no moral justification to walk into a shopping mall or school classroom or bowling alley and start shooting—is to remind the world that lives are precious and murders equal hell. Thus the recent mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine (apparently the 565th mass shooting in the U.S. this year) generated painful eulogies of the victims in the media, cutting open the national soul. Yes, their deaths are unspeakable tragedies!
by Richard Eskow | November 4, 2023 - 5:40am | permalink
Western leaders have been speaking in double-talk since the bombing of Gaza began, but no amount of newspeak can hide their real message. When it comes to the “rules-based order,” they’ve let us know the rules don’t apply to them.
I’ve known some of these people in my time—the diplomats and lawmakers, the pundits and politicians and advisors and analysts. Their manners are impeccable. They always use the right pronouns. They speak of human rights, but their actions shout the truth their lips refuse to whisper.
The world hears them loud and clear.
They’re the people Dante wrote about in the Inferno, the “sad souls who live without infamy and without praise” between Heaven and Hell, the ones who will march forever with “the craven choir of those angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but only to themselves.”
Dante called it “the great refusal,” this decision not to take a side. And by sides, I don’t mean Israel or Hamas. I mean the side that represents law, diplomacy, and international institutions, and the side that represents lawlessness, hatred, and brute force. The side that honors life, and the side that exults in death.
by Medea Benjamin | November 1, 2023 - 5:34am | permalink
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies
On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan.
Israel’s UN Ambassador responded with utter disdain, accusing those who voted in favor of the “ridiculous resolution” of supporting "the defense of Nazi terrorists" over Israel. In Gaza, Israel’s response to the global call for a truce was to escalate its bombing and expand its ground invasion.
The U.S. corporate media have not helped Americans understand how isolated our government is in its unconditional support and resupply of weapons for Israel’s genocidal military campaign, which has killed over 8,000 Palestinians, 30% of them women and 40% of them children, while destroying hospitals, apartment buildings, streets and schools, and turning Gaza into nothing short of hell on Earth for the bereaved survivors. According to Save the Children, Israel has killed more children in Gaza in three weeks than have been killed in all global conflicts since 2019.
by Lucian K. Truscott IV | October 29, 2023 - 7:08am | permalink
You know who is still commiting you know what.
The message threaded throughout these other takes is that as a "warrior state" now - as opposed to a helpless, passive non-state (TIME, Nov. 6, p. 36) Israel has to take care not to overreact to the atrocities committed against it on Oct. 7th, like the U.S. did after 9/11 (killing over 300,000 innocent Iraqis). If it doesn't all that will remain in the world's memory will be images of the shattered bodies of innocent young children in Gaza. Certainly, the Israeli defense minister's earlier remark that "there are no innocent Gazans" doesn't redound to his - or Israel's benefit- in terms of a proportionate response as opposed to pure revenge. Let's hope all of this madness ends soon!
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