© Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty ImagesA Palestinian man with a child outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 12.
Last Saturday, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing more than 1,300 people, including 247 soldiers. Israel vowed to retaliate, cut off water and electricity to Gaza and began bombardment of the strip. The Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that the death toll in Gaza from Israel's military actions stood at roughly 1,800 people, including more than 580 children and more than 350 women.
As Israelis and Jewish people express their terror, shock and grief, Palestinians are (rightfully) pointing out that their own pain and deaths under the actions of the Israeli state have been ignored for years. Outside the battle arena, in the public and private spheres and especially on social media, there has been appalling commentary by people openly endorsing violence and genocide. People who support safety for Israel's citizens are accused of being Zionist colonizers, while those who support safety and human rights for Palestinians are accused of being Hamas sympathizers and cool with the slaughter of innocents.
Language is being hijacked. People using the terms "decolonization" and "liberation" in describing Palestinians' struggle for human rights have had their remarks taken out of context and have been accused of championing Hamas's brand of terrorism. This not only silences debate on the illegal, morally unjust occupation of Palestinian territory, but also implies a subconscious, irrational fear of oppressed minorities anywhere rising up and exacting violent revenge.
Our institutions are meeting this moment not with clarity, but with double standards. Palestinians who have lost family members, invited to appear on TV, are asked amid their grief whether they support Hamas. (Do we ask Israelis whether they support Palestinian civilians and children being killed by their country's state agents?) Journalists who cast themselves as arbiters of truth have amplified unverified claims, including one that 40 babies had been decapitated by Hamas militants. (As of Friday morning, there was no photographic evidence nor government confirmation to support the claim.)
Hamas's attack was horrific. To many of my Jewish friends, it represents a nightmare scenario. I spoke with Jonathan Metzl, a friend and physician and the author of "Dying of Whiteness," about how he has been processing these events.
"In my family history" during the Holocaust, he said, "I had a small number of relatives who escaped to Palestine at the time, who escaped the gas chambers, and everybody else stayed in Europe and was murdered. We lost 90 relatives to gas chambers. And so with [Israel] there's a sense that if things go to s---, there's a place that will accept me, and that's the space Israel occupies for a lot of people."
Any human being can empathize with the deep, DNA-level need for safety. One does not have to be Jewish or Israeli to extend understanding and sympathy to those living through the current crisis, and no human should have to live with such mortal fear baked into their multigenerational stories. This is one reason global leaders created international human rights laws, which in this conflict are apparently being ignored by state and non-state actors alike.
It is also the reason the United States cannot stand by and allow Israel to carry out the collective punishment it has declared it will exact. It cannot stand by as Israeli officials engage in genocidal language and describe genocidal intent against Palestinians for the actions of Hamas.
Israeli officials on Friday ordered more than 1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate within 24 hours, a demand the United Nations described as "calamitous." As my Post colleagues reported, "with exits to Israel and Egypt shut, the retaliatory military operations have effectively turned the narrow 25-mile-long Gaza Strip into a death trap."
Comment: The Israelis also proceeded to bomb any convoys trying to evacuate to other areas.
A death trap. The last time millions of people were targeted and trapped based on their identity, the world said "never again." As of Friday, the U.S. response has been to say its focus is on creating "safe zones" for Gazans — but officials have stopped short of condemning Israel's order. If Israel proceeds to make good on its threats to turn Gaza into flattened pavement, it's all the more clear that "never again" does not apply to Arab or Muslim lives.
The global necropolitics is already clear — i.e., whose lives matter and whose don't.
Commentators have used American framing of this cataclysm as Israel's "9/11 moment," and it chills me to the core as an American.
That attack's trauma to the American psyche led us to demonize Arabs and Muslims, overinflate our already bloated military-industrial complex and engage in a "war on terrorism" that killed more than 7,000 American soldiers, 200,000 Iraqi civilians and 70,000 Afghan civilians.
I would hope that the "only democracy in the Middle East" would learn from the United States' mistakes and atrocities, end the occupation, oust the walking bag of right-wing corruption that is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and call for a cease-fire. If the sadistic status quo keeps up, the only winners of these cycles of violence will be the weapons dealers — while the rest of us lose our common, shared humanity.
"Like one who takes a dog by the ears Is he who passes by and meddles with strife not belonging to him." Proverbs 26:17