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.