Like many people, there are mornings when we are unable to listen to the news taking place in Gaza, as it is so deeply distressing that the mind shuts down at the daily bombing and the horrific death count. The only parallel in literary terms can be found in “Dante’s Inferno,” a place where Israel’s leaders and their militaristic enablers will surely reside in the minds of future generations. How will they possibly atone for the slaughter of women and children, as they continue to justify their atrocities with specious arguments?
There are moral consequences for the wholesale destruction taking place. An ancient people is being destroyed and American complicity is clearly evident in the freely given weaponry. As the well-known journalist Thomas Friedman said in a New York Times article, “This Israeli government is not our ally,” ” … this ultranationalist, messianic Israeli government is not America’s ally. It’s priority is not peace with its neighbors, its priority is the annexation of the West Bank, the expulsion of the Palestinians of Gaza and the re-establishment there of Israeli settlements …”
This war is a one-sided conflict in which Israeli air power overwhelms the civilian population. What is taking place is a massacre posing as a war, resulting in the utter destruction of every institution of higher learning and every hospital. Now there is even the denial of food, ostensibly as a weapon of war, to induce mass starvation. Two million Palestinians are compelled to live in refugee tents and even these are unsafe with the resumption of bombing while the ceasefire has ceased being a ceasefire and the Israeli leadership has become bereft of even a modicum of moral scruples.
The poet W.H. Auden said it well, “…those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” This “evil” is being perpetrated upon an ancient indigenous people in willful ignorance of the generational traumas that the victims are suffering and will continue to suffer.
In Exodus, it is said, “Ye shalt not afflict any widow or fatherless child … and they cry unto me I will surely hear their cry and my wrath shall wax hot…”. Surely this “wrath [will] wax hot” and the “deep gnawing guilt” will play itself out upon generations yet to be born.
Middle East envoys “met with a senior Israeli delegation in Qatar to discuss a truce in Gaza … but Israel has refused to alter its position on ceasefire/hostage deal talks, an Israeli official told Haaretz. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relies upon the U.S. to give him international protection and rages against even the mildest criticism, such as from French President Emmanuel Macron, who said that Netanyahu’s policy in Gaza was “shameful” and that European countries should increase sanctions.
On the question of genocide, seven leading international experts were interviewed by NRC, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and were unequivocal: Not only have they all come to believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the vast majority of their peers in academia concur.
“Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey. “Uğur Ümit Üngör, who works at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, agreed. Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman of Open University of Israel initially “opposed the genocide label” until Netanyahu’s government flouted the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza.
Strong waves of condemnation included an open letter signed by 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, stating they cannot “turn a blind eye or remain silent at this renewed [onslaught on Gaza].”