Opposing genocide is a moral not a political
choice.
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There is only one way to
end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations.
Israel has amply demonstrated,
including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh,
that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the
Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to
Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear
they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political
party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a
boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of
Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe
Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the
Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too
powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the
slaughter.
In short, we are impotent
and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must
accept as normal governance the shipment of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use
of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active
obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.
Genocide, the
internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be
equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration.
It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to
genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global
society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks
every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And
to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in
what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical
evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
The plethora of Holocaust
studies should have made this indelible point. But Holocaust studies were hijacked by Zionists.
They insist that the Holocaust is unique, that it is somehow set apart from
human nature and human history. Jews are deified as eternal victims of
anti-Semitism. Nazis are endowed with a special kind of inhumanity. Israel, as
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington concludes, is the solution.
The Holocaust was one of several genocides carried out in the 19th and 20th
centuries. But historical context is ignored and with it our understanding of
the dynamics of mass extermination.
The fundamental lesson of
the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all
become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit,
if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.
“Monsters exist,” Levi, who
survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are
too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the
functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
To confront evil — even if
there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows
us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,”
to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress.
It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims
they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and
an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”
What does it say about us
if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds
hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us
if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water
supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens
of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us
if we permit for 10 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages
and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or
find shelter in crude tents?
What does it say about us
when we accept the murder of 16,456
children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us
when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools —
including the Al-Tabaeen school in
Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr,
or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us
when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing
handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially
booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times
dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us
when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of
prisoners?
Are these the kinds of
allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message
does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to
moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right
and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Protestors outside the
Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago demand an end to
the genocide and U.S. aid to Israel, but inside we are fed a sickening
conformity. Hope lies in the streets.
A moral stance always has a
cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
“But what of the price of
peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was
sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam,
asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”
I think of the good,
decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How
many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even
as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm
in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income,
their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan
of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that
fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us
have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us
lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill
repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect
that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on
schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should
fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because
it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered
or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there
is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no
makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making
of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to
bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The question is not whether
resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to
love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it
the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always
embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is
censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil
disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as
they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with
the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the
abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the
genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.
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