by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak
“I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza; what I saw wasn’t war, it was annihilation.”
— Dr. Irfan Galaria, writing in the Los Angeles Times
Late last week, as the world was learning of the discovery of the body of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in a car entoured by the bodies of five relatives, several meters from the lifeless bodies of the two Red Crescent paramedics dispatched, with Israeli approval, to rescue her, all apparently killed by Israeli shelling and bombing, and less than two weeks after the world heard the girl’s 15-year-old cousin pleading with a Red Crescent dispatcher to send help as an Israeli tank bore down on the car until the girl screamed amidst the rat-a-tat-tat of Israeli gunfire followed by a harrowing silence as well as the dispatcher’s subsequent conversation with 5-year-old Hind as she pleaded for three hours for help to come, an overwhelming majority of 77 United States Senators including all but two Democrats and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders voted to send Israel $14 million more worth of arms, effectively enabling a rogue state which has already killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians including at least 12,000 children — 5,000 since the International Court of Justice ordered it to stop on January 26 and not counting 6,000 buried under the rubble of buildings leveled by Israel — to keep on killing with effective impunity. (Indeed, the mainstream media, at least here in France, has devoted more air time over the past week to playing Where’s Navalny’s body? than it has over the past 130 days interrogating the fate of those 6,000 civilians. And the one public radio report on Israel’s assassination of Hind and her relatives practically made it sound like they were just caught amidst the tank fire, victims of a perpetrator-less tragedy rather than having been targeted as all the evidence suggests.) And Tuesday, just days after the Israeli army besieged, bombed the fourth floor of, forcibly evacuated, kidnapped many of the medical staff of, and cut electricity at the largest hospital in Southern Gaza thus causing between two and eight Intensive Care Unit patients to suffocate to death when their oxygen supply was cut off, and with one of six Palestinian children starving to death and 2.2 million people facing imminent famine according to the World Health Organization, Joe Biden once again vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have ordered an immediate cease-fire, stopped the carnage, and let substantive humanitarian aid in.
Now, before we go on, I want to ask you to just stop, close your eyes, make them the eyes of a 5-year-old child trapped in a car with the dead bodies of five relatives including her 15-year-old cousin, and imagine what it is like staring at the monstrous machine eyes of their assailant, a tank intent on killing you. I don’t know about you, but when I was five years old, my mother was walking me to Alvarado Elementary School in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, the face of authority was not a tank firing bullets at me and my family, it was Miss Stettner, in her high boots and with her long black hair and Karen Valentine dimples, drawing pictures and forming letters on a blackboard and opening my mind up as her smile held me mesmerized, and I still had 57 years of education and teacher crushes ahead of me. And unlike the Palestinian boy who turned up at a Gaza hospital recently with enough of his leg blown away that you could see the bones after Israel bombed the school with UNITED NATIONS written on it where his family had taken refuge thinking they’d be safe, killing the rest of his family as the boy recounted to the American plastic surgeon who tried to treat him (sterile instruments and instruments period are at a minimum at Gaza’s few remaining functional hospitals, with Israel blocking all but a trickle of deliveries of medical and food supplies; the doctor, interviewed on Democracy Now, said he witnessed hundreds of trucks lined up on the Egyptian side of the Rafa border waiting to get in), when I was 14, I was insulting my own nose as Cyrano and wooing Naomi Woolf’s Roxanne in a drama class at Hoover Junior High School. When I was little more than 15, the age of Hind’s sister before Israel nipped her life out as it was budding, I was not screaming as faceless Jewish soldiers were firing real bullets at me determined to kill me until I could scream no more, I was offstage with the rest of the cast of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” crying over our imagined deaths at the hands of an imaginary Gestapo as the final scene — Otto Frank returning to the Secret Annex after the war to discover his daughter’s journal so that he could share its lessons with the world — played out, little imagining that 46 years later the roles would be reversed, with Jewish soldiers hunting down and killing in their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their mosques and their churches another Semitic people, thus crapping on Anne Frank’s most important legacy: Never again and putting to the test her most enduring precept: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart.”
Even for those of us who have observed Israel’s arrogant comportment with the Palestinians subject to its rule and ongoing defiance of international law over the years, particularly in Gaza (where this is not the first time it has killed civilians) and to a lesser extent in the West Bank which like Gaza it has illegally occupied for 57 years, Israel’s vicious, merciless, genocidal acts — by the evidence, those doing the killing and those directing them do not see Palestinians, even children, as human beings — over the past four months, as it over-avenges Hamas’s equally (in degree and dehumanizing optic if not in scale) vicious and inhuman massacre of 1200 people and kidnapping of more than 200 surpasses what History has shown us Man is capable of doing to his fellow man, at least since 1945, as Israel continues to bank on and abuse the latitude accorded it in the United States and Europe and among many Jews because of the last Holocaust to perpetrate another genocide.
Because I have been watching this, watching Israel’s human rights abuses, watching the growth of an Apartheid state which treats people as lesser citizens and human beings because of their race, watching its bombing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon for 18 years, I have long been liberated from the blinders which have made so many Jews refuse to see — to believe — what Israel has become because it is a Jewish state or because they feel we need a Jewish State to protect us from the next Holocaust, refuse to believe the next genocide could be generated by an allegedly Jewish state. In this respect I am not disillusioned that a “Jewish” state could do this because I stopped believing in the intrinsic morality of such a state just because it lays claim to that appellation a long time ago.
I am, however, disillusioned by Joe Biden, who has singularly (well, not so singularly as all that; he had a little help from his secretary of state and those Democratic and Republican senators who voted to keep the bombs coming) destroyed any residue of the belief I once had in the ability and inkling of my country, globally, to be a force for good, a moral beacon. (There are too many good Americans, including Palestinian and Jewish Americans — as there are Israelis, including journalists, members of parliament, and conscientiously objecting soldiers, and of course Palestinians — trying to counter their president’s effective enabling of genocide for me not to believe in our individual power to still do good.)
For despite Anita Hill, despite his approval as a senator of George Bush’s illegal and bloody invasion of Iraq, until he continued sending arms to Israel in the face of this imminent and now in process genocide and blocking any efforts to stop this carnage, I had still believed that Joe Biden was essentially a decent man, a confirmed and sincere anti-racist who cared as much about Black and Brown (including Arab) lives as he does about white (Ukrainian) lives. And despite Iraq, despite Vietnam, despite Cambodia, despite Chili, despite Iran (where we instigated the overthrow of a democratically elected government in the 1950s), despite Kissinger and all the war crimes in which he implicated us, I still believed that my country could be a moral beacon for the world.
But my country’s conduct here, its continued and persistent effective fueling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in the face of Israel’s deliberate enfeebling of hospitals (another tool of genocide) and killing of medical workers and journalists, our continued blocking of efforts by the rest of the world to stop the killing and start substantially funneling in the humanitarian aid, our increasingly brazen cynicism — State Department spokesman Matt Miller telling reporters that the U.S. had confidence in an Israeli investigation of 5-year-old Hind’s killing; if I had a shekel for every time Israel announced it was investigating itself for killing civilians, including Palestinian-American journalists killed by Israeli snipers despite being clearly identified as Press and American defenders of Palestinian homes being leveled by Israeli tractors, and never followed through, I’d be able to found my own Jewish state — for me my country’s ongoing support of this rogue state despite its genocidal rampage is worse than a tragedy. It’s a moral abdication.
And it’s appeasement. It’s appeasement of a genocidal state which, unlike even Germany, which by setting up the model concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where Jews were allowed to create an orchestra and which the Red Cross was invited to tour (Israel, by contrast, is killing Red Crescent workers, 14 to date according to a spokesman for the organization, as well 100 UNRWA employees according to UNRWA), at least indicated it knew that what it was doing would be looked at as wrong by other nations and tried to gloss it over by presenting a counter-image, however false, Israel — which as opposed to conjuring Theresienstadt has resurrected the Warsaw Ghetto, as Masha Gessen has pointed out — doesn’t seem to care what the rest of the world thinks of its atrocities, a law upon itself, here enabled by the sheriff.
As to why that sheriff is allowing Israel to get away with it, if Joe Biden and those 77 senators thinks it’s because if they cut off Israel’s arms supplies and stopped blocking UN efforts to impose a cease-fire and let substantial humanitarian aid in they’d lose the Jewish vote, they haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on on American college campuses, and they must think very little of our own moral values, to believe that we would countenance a genocide because this time around the genociders happen to be wearing Mogen Davids on their tanks.
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