Scattered thoughts from Gaza to Nablus to Christmas

Scraps of paper everywhere. Thoughts everywhere. Trying to comprehend genocide. Trying to bust through the lies, even though the truth is so painful. Have you turned away yet? Have the statistics numbed you? The total number of Gazan's killed, half of them children? The number of journalists; the number of hospital workers; the numbers from just one family. The range of buildings bombed including hospitals, mosques, shelters, schools, universities, apartment buildings - because there might be a nest of Hamas fighters hiding there. The kinds of deprivations forced on ordinary people: no water to drink, no toilet to flush, no flour mill or bread bakery (bombed), no safety anywhere. I know. I dson't read the lists anymore. I know what is on the lists. And I don't want to see another image of a 2 or 3 year old child's bloody face or of a mother embracing a body bag. Try to stay focused on this: The United States is funding and encouraging genocide. Israel was birthed by lies and the lies provide cover for its goal: take the land and expell the natives. Those whom you can't expell, you can kill or jail, or just starve, little by little for a while, until an opportunity presents itself to finish the job. Here is what I wrote to my local newspaper on November 9th, and which they have refused to print. Why Does Israel Attack Hamas? Who is Hamas? And why does Israel need to destroy Hamas, so much so that Israel is willing to kill thousands of civilians in order, they hope, to be rid of Hamas entirely and forever? Or is there another objective: to be rid of all Palestinians? What I have learned over the last 21 years of frequent visits to Palestine and Israel is that the answers to these questions are not easily available. Our media, which repeats Israel’s official answers, does not help us to understand the facts as Palestinians live them. Hamas came on the scene in Palestine in 1987 as an Islamist alternative to the secular liberation movement headed by Yasser Arafat. At first Hamas refrained from electoral politics but was gaining popularity by providing neighborhood centers, clinics and schools where such essential services were lacking. When they did get on the ballot in 2006, they won local elections all over Palestine: the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Everyone was taken by surprise. I think even Hamas was surprised. Certainly Arafat’s party was not expecting defeat, and the Western democracies were stunned. Their reaction was just as surprising: “No, no, no. They are a terrorist organization and cannot be allowed to win elections. Arrest them!” The international community, led by the US and EU, rejected the election results and supported Israel’s arresting of the elected candidates. But this was not so successful in Gaza. There, Arafat’s party, Fatah, was planning a military take over, but was preempted by Hamas. In a bloody coup Hamas kicked Fatah out of Gaza and has ruled it ever since. Hamas is a political, religious (Islamist) governing body that has an autocratic grip on the 2.3 million Gazans. (I don’t know how many of those civilians actually like Hamas or support it.) They have an army called the Qassam Brigades and seem to tolerate the presence of other armed groups, such as Islamic Jihad. I asked above why Israel needs to destroy Hamas. Yes, Hamas attacked Israel, killing innocent civilians along with many soldiers at several military bases. Such an attack cannot go unpunished, and Israel would have to show its citizens that they will be better protected in the future. But does the punishment require the blanket bombing of an entire population, the targeting of hospitals, schools, refugee camps and shelters? The whole world is horrified by these scenes and the huge death toll, plus the strangulation caused by cutting food and fuel to everyone. Doesn’t Israel see that they are losing the support of popular opinion, most dramatically in the Muslim world, but now in the U.S. as well? Why don’t they stop bombing and starving people and instead negotiate a settlement? Haven’t they won already? They have shown that they are more powerful than Hamas and they have the military support of the United States and its allies. I think the answer is this: the reason Israel will continue its genocide is because they want to be rid of all Gazans. Those they can’t kill with bombs, they will drive South into smaller and smaller areas where there are no resources to support life, and the few that do survive might accept living in Egypt in new refugee camps. Meanwhile, the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem can be killed or driven out by the armed settlers, whose violence has been going on while we are riveted by Gaza. Whole agricultural villages have been evacuated by settler militias, and their homes demolished, their farm animals dispersed. The Israeli army has invaded the West Bank cities and refugee camps, shooting protesters and destroying roads and infrastructure. I have friends in the West Bank, and they tell me that nowhere is safe. They also say that they are not allowed on the major roads, their cities are cut off from surrounding areas by new checkpoints. It feels like this is part of a strategy to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine/Israel started in 1948 when more than half the population was driven from their homes, their villages leveled to the ground, in order to create an exclusively Jewish state. I would like to be proven wrong. I pray for a ceasefire to happen immediately, for humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza, for settlers to be reined in by Israel instead of supported by the army. I call my Congresspeople and I stand on street corners to show my government that the carnage we are paying for must stop. Not in my name. No more violence. Violence only brings retribution. We all make mistakes, sometimes huge mistakes, but it is never too late to change. P.S. Not all Israelis are supporting the genocide, and many Israeli families of the hostages are calling for “Everyone for Everyone” meaning, all Palestinian prisoners should be freed and exchanged for all of the hostages. It is Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwansaa/New Years, and I don't want to celebrate. I have bought a few gifts, but can't utter the words, "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year", because there is nothing merry or happy about genocide. I do pray for you all to be well, and I pray for God to intervene in the hearts of politicians, generals and weapons manufacturers who believe killing, torturing, brutalizing is okay. I believe Jesus still weeps over Jerusalem.

The Horrors of This War and All Wars

I've not been writing, just trying to keep up with the news and the feeling of being overwhelmed with grief. But when I saw the photos of Palestinian men stripped of all clothes except underpants, handcuffed behind their backs and kneeling in the dirt - a lot of men of all ages, sizes and shapes, stripped of their dignity, on display before the world with nothing left to prove they are human beings, my outrage drove me to speak up. After these men lost their homes to the bombs, and maybe lost their wives and children under the rubble, after they were forced to seek shelter in a public school classroom with forty other people and share a toilet with 200 other people, and beg for food and be unable to protect their families as is expected of men...after all that, this. Nakedness. Israel knows that Arab men are very private with their bodies. That's why it choses this means of humiliation and uses it at checkpoints throughout the West Bank, making individual men strip down in front of everyone waiting: women, children, their own children. Not just to show who is in control, but to break the spirit. But it is not working. The men show no emotion but their silent faces say, "You cannot see into me. You cannot know me or what I am feeling right now. And that makes you a little afraid, because you know that what you are doing is wrong. Deep inside you know that, and it will haunt you." I took my shock at the photos of near-naked men in Gaza to the weeklky peace vigil in Greenfield. There I saw a Palestinian friend, and I told him of my horror. And he said, "This is not new. It happened in all the wars on Gaza before this one** and in Israeli prisons. It has happened to me." Oh. So it is just another weapon of war. I had forgotten about Abu Ghraib where American soldiers made Iraqi Arab men pile on top of one another - also naked. I think I am shocked now as I was then, because I forget how degrading war can be. I need to write to share with you the other things about this war that shake my belief in he goodness of humans. The gratuitous, numerous ways to make Gazans suffer, like having to leave their cars and walk the 10-15 miles towards a supposedly safer place. Like making a man abandon his wheelchair and walk through the checkpoint, even thogh he cannot walk. Like taking away water for drinking, for flushing the toilet, for washing a baby's soiled bottom, for menstrating women and girls.``Yesterday I saw a video of a hastily errected tent city that had forgotten to provide toilets, so the people were digging holes in the sand and trying to erect a canvass curtain around the holes, for privacy. Today I saw a video of that same tent city, or one just like it, in the pouring rain and at least six inches of water on the ground, no way to keep dry inside or outside the tents, and I thought about those holes-in-the-ground toilets... I make myself imagine living like this - cold, hungry, dirty, helpless and grieving loss of home, of loved ones, of all comfort and normalcy, and then having to find the energy to care for small children. I don't think I could do it. I ask God to help me to understand how some people can treat other people this way. But there is no understanding. I want it to stop. I want you to stop it. I want to believe it can be stopped. **Israel bombed Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and twice in 2021.