Painful questions

 

On campuses, in the streets and on the steps of the Capitol, people call ever more loudly for a cease-fire in Gaza.  The violence is so terrible that no further information should be necessary.  You can hate what is happening without hating Israelis or Palestinians, Jews or Muslim.  You must, or turn in your membership card in the human species.

War is never a good time to expect rationality, much less truth.  But here is Avi Dichter, Israel's minister of agriculture and Likud party member, saying on television, "We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba."  I thought they were.  Ethnic cleansing is another term.  "Nakba" (catastrophe) refers to the forcible removal of Palestinians in 1948.  Given the continued violence perpetrated piecemeal by "settlers" in the West Bank, is it time to talk about a final solution?  Too soon?

Genocide has been around for centuries -- Carthago delenda est, remember? -- but the word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, as the attempted genocide of Europe's Jews reached a climax.  In 1948 it was recognized as a crime in international law.  It gives me no joy to accuse the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants of genocide, but what else can you call it?  Like this woman interviewed by Isaac Chotiner in the New Yorker, who imagines an Israel stretching to the banks of the Nile.  King David was never that ambitious.

I know an overwhelming majority of Israelis are fed up with Netanyahu, whether for his apartheid rule (another loaded word) or his failure to prevent October 7, or for funding Hamas as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority to begin with.  I also know that as an American I have no solid ground to stand on, living in a country that was wrestled from its inhabitants through violence, subterfuge and even bacteriological warfare over a mountain of broken treaties.  We began by pretending they did not exist or were savages unworthy of honorable treatment.  We punished them for fighting back and put them in concentration camps called "reservations."  Now we celebrate them on what used to be Columbus Day, as if holidays matter.  Rightly, we feel remorse.

And like the Israelis, we can't make amends by going back where our ancestors came from.  We must just resolve to make the future less iniquitous than the past as we try to share this planet in its ever more dire condition.  We have to end terrorism by removing the conditions that make it attractive to people without hope.  We can't talk until the shooting stops.  

Friends don't let friends commit genocide.