OPERATION LEBENSRAUM
Stop the Gaza Holocaust Now
Fighting for Palestine is fighting for humanity
Peace without Justice is itself a major injustice because it means that one party has capitulated unwillingly. Peace without Justice is coerced submission. No colonial subject consents to be governed by a foreign regime. No one agrees to be treated as a second-class citizen, or less than one, on their own streets.
Palestinians, trapped in the neglected districts of a modern Jim Crow society, cannot travel freely, cannot study or work or live where they please, are monitored relentlessly, and are disqualified from most opportunities to improve their lives. They are dependent upon Israel. Because that relationship is coercive, Palestinians are the involuntary subjects of an alien and illegitimate government.
Instead of social and economic justice, Israel delivers indiscriminate punishment to unarmed civilians in response to the violent acts of terrorists. To appreciate how grotesquely wrong that is, imagine for a moment that scores of Hamas leaders were scattered throughout Israel. Would the IDF indiscriminately bomb entire city blocks to kill one or two of them, along with hundreds of Israeli citizens? Would they bomb homeless shelters and refugee camps and hospitals and ambulance convoys full of displaced Jewish families because of a rumor that a villain lurked among them?
Expressed as an acceptable number of civilian casualties per legitimate target killed, the value that Israel attaches to an innocent Muslim life appears to be one 20th to one 50th of the value of a dead bad guy. Do you suppose that this ratio holds for innocent Jewish civilians as well? Can you picture one dead Hamas fighter beside a pile of 20 or 30 Jewish schoolchildren in a Jerusalem alley, and the IDF soldiers responsible glowing with satisfaction? Israel would not willingly pay a small fraction of the price for eliminating Hamas that it is demanding of Gaza’s residents.
Why are Muslim lives valued so much less than others? Why are piles of dead Palestinian schoolchildren an acceptable form of collateral damage from Israel’s civilian bombing campaign? That’s not self defense; it’s a war crime. Violating the minimum standards of civilized behavior because you believe you’re special makes you a sociopath, not a patriot.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is disgracing Israel with extravagant violence — pursuing his Final Solution to the Palestinian question. He has long dreamed of directing an Israeli Holocaust, and now Hamas has handed him the pretext he needs, his own Reichstag fire, to follow the most grotesque, blood-soaked path possible to permanent ethnic cleansing. He might succeed in the short term, perhaps well enough to stay in office and out of prison (where he no doubt belongs); but only a peaceful and, most importantly, just, agreement has any chance to endure long term.
The 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas included civilian targets and civilian hostages, and was therefore unjust, but it was also predictable, which necessarily means that it was avoidable. The relentless pressure that Israel exerts on Palestinians can only increase the probability of a violent reply driven by rage. And that’s a major part of the tragedy here. Israel double-dares Hamas to attack, then cries foul when the inevitable happens. A move from the master playbook of cowards and bullies.
I disapprove of the 7/10 attack, but I also understand it. Decades of injustice, humiliation, arbitrary arrest, capricious eviction, extra-judicial confinement and punishment, and constant, intrusive surveillance must one day be answered with an eruption of violence. That is a foolproof recipe.
Netanyahu knows this. He no doubt welcomed that expression of rage. He certainly could have avoided it, but he chose not to. And now he will carry out a massacre, what the media are calling “war.” Of course there will be little real fighting. Netanyahu has his Muslim scapegoats locked in a pen and he will prosecute the cowardly mass slaughter that he has long dreamed of.
He must be stopped. Israelis must defy him. If you cooperate with this government and its evil aspirations, you will live with the blood of innocents staining your hands forever. If you fall for the half-measure of initiating reform once the “war” is over, you will have failed as human beings. You can make this humanitarian catastrophe right only by acting now. Denounce the PM and his cabinet and force their resignations, before you have to denounce them in retrospect, over a mountain of civilian bodies that the world will never forget. Fight for Justice; fight for Palestine; fight for humanity.
Yes, Gaza might be forced to submit to military superiority in the near term, but that cannot last. Eventually the blowback will come. It must come. Prolonged injustice guarantees prolonged violence. No amount of military exertion can fix this.
I think religion plays too great a role here and I wish it were otherwise. But for those who can’t resist the draw of Biblical thinking, let me close by reminding you of something: The nation of Israel was promised to the Jews, to the children of Isaac; but the people of Palestine, the children of Ishmael, are as much adored by God as any Jew. Was it not the God of Israel, the God of Abraham and Isaac, who enacted a life-saving miracle in the desert for Hagar and Ishmael? The God of Abraham feels, intensely, the suffering of all his children. The pain we experience wounds him deeply — more so the pain we force upon each other needlessly.
I know in my bones that God will curse the people of Israel for the gratuitous evil they are visiting upon their cousins trapped in Gaza, an evil that will be repaid — that must be repaid — by men inspired by predictable, hence avoidable, rage.
Unless Justice should finally triumph.
