Sunday, October 22, 2023

Voices of Reason and Compassion on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza

Today I share a compilation of perspectives and voices on the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza. I consider all of these voices to be ones of both reason and compassion. I hope you do too.

I start with Democracy Now!’s October 17 interview with Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator.





[T]his choir of incitement . . . is the road to hell for everyone. If Israel is going to exist in that part of the world, then it has tied its fate to the Palestinians in that part of the world. And it cannot be zero-sum, because what we are doing is just creating more and more hatred. And [we need to] step back from that; not propel [ourselves] further into it.

. . . [We need to] step back from the brink in the immediate term, and then get to grips with the fact that Palestinians, who live without hope, rights, the ability to plan a future, are not going to succumb to that. It doesn’t justify anything, but we have been warning for years that this will explode, and it has. And now we need a different approach.




The violence in Gaza and Israel is bringing horrifying new levels of human suffering to both Israelis and Palestinians.

Both sides have committed heinous violations of international law, and all attacks on civilians must be condemned. But if we’re serious about preventing such horrors in the future, we have to go beyond condemnation.

A lesson we ignore at our peril is that oppression undermines not only the rights, dignity, and lives of the oppressed, but eventually the security of the oppressors as well. The apartheid system that’s been suffocating Palestinians for so long is now also undermining the safety of ordinary Israeli civilians. They’ve become victims of the same system.

We can’t understand how we got here – or how to end the crisis – until we grapple with the immensity of Palestinian suffering. And for us in the United States, it means confronting the role our government and tax dollars play in enabling that oppression to continue.

Explosions of violence never just happen. Since 2007, Gazans have lived under siege, prohibited from leaving their open air prison by a high-security militarized wall and platoons of Israeli soldiers.

Well before the latest escalation, the transit of most goods was banned. Gazans couldn’t get construction materials to repair the apartment blocks, power plants, water treatment facilities, hospitals, school, mosques, and churches that Israel bombed repeatedly – in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021.

Emergency medical permits were often denied, leaving many Gazans to die without care.

Electricity was already limited. A 72-year-old woman in Gaza told a reporter last January, “It is hard to imagine, but we used to experience 24 hours of electricity each day in Gaza; now we are lucky if we get six.”

Water was already unavailable except by expensive purchases from Israeli water companies. And food has long been scarce — by the age of two, 20 percent of Gaza’s children are already stunted.

Now that long-running siege is much worse.

On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a “total siege” of Gaza. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it’s all closed,” he said. For Gaza’s already impoverished and malnourished population, that’s not just collective punishment – it’s genocide.

. . . For decades, Palestinian resistance has taken overwhelmingly non-violent forms. But the world didn’t hear – or if it heard, it didn’t answer. When the UN warned in 2012 and 2015 that by 2020 Gaza would be “unlivable” without a “herculean effort” by the international community, the world didn’t respond.

This time the resistance took a violent form, including Hamas targeting civilians in horrifying and illegal ways. Those illegitimate acts must be condemned. But if we’re serious about preventing violence – all violence – we need to remember they didn’t come out of nowhere.

We need to change the conditions from which this brutality sprang.

– Phyllis Bennis
Excerpted from “The Answer to Hamas’ Brutality
Is Not to Eviscerate Innocent Palestinians”
Foreign Policy in Focus via Common Dreams
October 13, 2023



The most immediate need right now is for a deescalation. World leaders, and specifically the U.S. and the Biden administration, need to understand that this is not a retaliation by Israel towards Hamas. What we are seeing now is the effort by Israel to pursue an ethnic cleansing campaign and to continue the Nakba, which began in 1948 and which has been ongoing since, in fits and starts, here and there. What we’re seeing is a massive rupture in the daily ethnic cleansing that Israeli authorities are going – are implementing against the Palestinians in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, as well as in the Gaza Strip. And now we’re seeing that rupture take the ethnic cleansing campaign from a daily continual basis into a significantly more focused attempt at getting rid of millions of Palestinians. We need to deescalate, and we need to ensure that humanitarian aid comes into the Gaza Strip, because this is impacting Gaza’s civilian population. This is a starting step.

The next step needs to be an acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid regime that is maintaining a system of domination against millions of Palestinians. It’s the only sovereign power in the land of historic Palestine, and it allows rights only to Israeli Jewish citizens, not to Palestinians. What happened on October 7th is a testament to the fact that that reality cannot go on. And that overturned the assumption that the U.S. administration as well as regional powers have always had, which is that Israel can continue to act with impunity, without any cost to its citizens. And I believe we cannot go back to that paradigm anymore.

– Tareq Baconi
Excerpted from “‘Divide and Rule’: How Israel Helped Start
Hamas to Weaken Palestinian Hopes for Statehood”
Democracy Now!
October 20, 2023



Marc Lamont Hill recently interviewed former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. During this interview, Ayalon told Hill that Israel will stop blockading vital resources to Gaza only if and when Hamas surrenders. As Michael Walker of Novara Media points out in the video below, Hill responded by noting that what Ayalon outlined constitutes collective punishment, a violation of international law.






Humanitarian corridors must be established immediately. The siege must end, and power be restored immediately so hospitals can be more than graveyards. Gazan civilians and foreign nationals must be given safe passage. There are surely phone calls going back and forth among world leaders today – including Europeans and Arabs – seeking desperately to broker some kind of humanitarian solution, to create a ceasefire and restore delivery of water, food and medical supplies.

Hamas is not the Palestinian people; in fact, Hamas displays dictatorial power over their own people in Gaza. Yet innocent Palestinians as well as Israelis are already paying a terrible price for what has happened, and their safety must be as high a priority for the world as should the safety of innocent Israelis.

Hamas has announced it will start executing the 150 hostages one by one if Israel takes military action against Gaza, leaving the hostage’s loved ones and the entire nation of Israel in a state of horrifying trauma. No person of good will anywhere in the world wants those hostages executed. The hatred spawned by such insanity would only increase the hostility that already exists between far too many Israelis and Palestinians – two peoples who we should remember lived in peace for centuries, and hopefully will live in peace together again someday. One of the tragic consequences of this situation is how many Palestinians and Israelis have worked for years to forge a better way – only to see their dreams of peace be shattered by what has occurred.

As President, in the years leading up to this I would have been far more active on behalf of an effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Supporting Israel militarily yet not playing an active role in emphasizing the need for Palestinian justice was a failure of American leadership and a transgression against our own values. Once Trump was out of office, I would have moved the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv. I would not have allowed the Abraham Accords to minimize the cause of justice for Palestinians. I would have demanded justice for Shireen Abu Akleh. I would have demanded that no military assistance provided to Israel – created by a Congressional Memorandum of Understanding that extends until 2028 – be used in a way that supports the occupation of the West Bank, the settlements, or the blockade of Gaza. I would have stated my opposition to all three. I would have worked assiduously with Middle East peace builders both there and here. I would have supported all efforts to create the resurrection of plans for a two-state solution. I would have used American power to side with our highest ally: humanity itself.

– Marianne Williamson
Excerpted from “Israel and Hamas:
An Eye for an Eye Leaves Everyone Dead”
Transform
October 13, 2023



Above: Jewish-led protesters hold a "ceasefire" banner during an October 16, 2023 demonstration outside the White House in Washington, D.C. (Photo: IfNotNow/X)


Thank you all for being here. I have never seen anything like this in my history of Jewish anti-Zionist activism. It’s been decades. We used to be tiny. We are huge and growing.

We have a sacred responsibility to engage with our parents, our grandparents, our uncles, our brothers and sisters, and try to save their souls, to keep them from indulging in this quest for bloody vengeance. We are here because we will not let our fears of antisemitism be manipulated in this way, as cover for war crimes and colonial land grabs and to foreclose on the possibility of a political solution, which will only come with an end to occupation, with an end to apartheid, with true Palestinian freedom and self-determination. We will not use the fact that many of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were refugees from genocide to justify making hundreds of thousands or even millions of new Palestinian refugees.

These are not our leaders, not in the Knesset, with its so-called unity government, and not here in Congress, which reconvenes now in part in order to approve new money and new weapons to send to Israel for its genocidal attack on Palestinians.




Israeli journalist Amira Hass (left), who has reported from the occupied West Bank and Gaza for over 30 years, was interviewed October 20 by Democracy Now! about her participation in the recent historic protest in Washington, D.C., led by American Jewish groups, calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Hass also spoke about the events leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, the ongoing hostage situation, and what could come next.

[The Washington D.C. protest] was an expression of common grief and shock of people, of Jews, whose main two slogans were “Not in our name” and “Ceasefire immediately.” And for me, it was very important to be there. So I was there as a person, as an individual, as a Jew, not as a journalist. There were quite a few Israelis that I know that live or study these days in the States.

And it was also, you know, like, we all need some kind of – this kind of support, which, by the way, Palestinians are not allowed to hold. Jews are allowed to hold demonstrations. I understand that all over Europe there are places where Palestinians are not allowed to hold demonstrations in solidarity with their slain people in Palestine. So, here, again, we are privileged, the Jews, that we can do things that Palestinians are not allowed to, though I know that here there were some. In the States, there were some demonstrations of Palestinians. But Palestinians are being silenced . . . their sense of grief is not being respected. They are called supporters of terror, whatever. And I was in Boston just before, and I could tell that even the word “Palestinian” is not allowed to be used in all kind of official statements.

I can very much identify with a feeling of being ostracized by the whole world as a Jew, of being not listened to. . . . [T]his indifference that the world shows to Palestinians, Palestinians’ plight, Palestinians’ ordeal is so shocking. And I, as a Jew, I say, and [as] the child of survivors and the grandchild of Jews who were murdered by Nazi Germany – my anger and despair . . . grow larger by the day, by the minute.

– Amira Hass
Excerpted from “Israeli Journalist Amira Hass,
Daughter of Holocaust Survivors, Calls for Gaza Ceasefire”
Democracy Now!
October 20, 2023



Josh Paul (right) was Director of Congressional and Public Affairs at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Paul says he had made a promise to himself when he joined over a decade ago that he would stay “as long as I felt the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do.”

Paul recently resigned from the bureau that oversees arms transfers to foreign nations, citing his objection to continued U.S. military assistance to Israel as its retaliatory bombardment and blockade of Gaza exacerbate a humanitarian crisis there.

Following is Paul’s October 19 appearance on PBS Newshour and an excerpt from Rachel Treisman’s NPR News story about Paul’s resignation.



“The difference here is that in all of those [other] cases [of arms transfers to a number of unsavory regimes] – when those within the department and the inter-agency with human rights concerns had done all the shaping they could – you knew the next step was for the sale to go to Congress where it would be held, debated, even voted against,” Josh Paul explained. “But with Israel, it’s a blank check from Congress. There’s no appetite for debate. There’s no real debate internal to the administration. And then there’s no one to hand the debate off to.”

Paul said the first thing he’d like the Biden administration to do is “simply follow their own public commitments.”

Paul explains that the administration’s new conventional arms transfer policy, enacted earlier this year, explicitly states that no transfers will be authorized under which the U.S. assesses that “it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit, facilitate the recipients’ commission of, or to aggravate risks that the recipient will commit: genocide; crimes against humanity; grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.”

Those include attacks directed against civilians and other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law, including acts of violence against children.

“So I think for us to look at the current situation and say the answer is as many bombs as Israel asks for, knowing that their use will lead in a direction exactly opposite to our stated policy goals . . . it’s disappointing, to say the least,” Paul said.

– Rachel Treisman
Excerpted from “Josh Paul, Former State Department Official
Explains Why He Resigned Over U.S. Arms Sent to Israel”
NPR News
October 19, 2023



In the following Rising segment, hosts Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave respond to Egyptian comedian and TV talk show host Bassem Youssef’s recent appearance on Piers Morgan’s program in which he shared what he would say to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he was an Israeli citizen.






For Zionist believers (I’m not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, anti-semitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.

The Israeli state’s current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days. The responsibility for these crimes of collective punishment rests solely with their perpetrators and their financial and military backers abroad. But we all have to figure out how to make it stop.

So how do we confront this violent ideology? For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as antisemitism by a great many Jews. And antisemitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.

What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.

It’s certainly worth a try. In these difficult times, I’d like to be part of a left like that.

– Naomi Klein
Excerpted from “In Gaza and Israel,
Side With the Child Over the Gun”
The Guardian
October 11, 2023



Amid the death and destruction from the shower of bombs dropping on Gaza like rain, truly the thing that has forever changed me is seeing how the world is turning into a hate mob against a civilian population, a majority of whom are refugees, the majority of whom are children, all of whom have been living besieged for 16 years. It is the media coverage priming the public to accept mass atrocities by using hateful and racist rhetoric that has left me feeling the most hopeless and scared. This incendiary and dehumanizing language used to describe Palestinians is going to contribute to genocide in Gaza and increasing violence against Muslims in the U.S., like the stabbing to death of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian 6-year-old in Illinois.

We need to change the trajectory now. We need to call for an immediate ceasefire and deescalation to prevent imminent genocide. The U.S. government is actively fueling violence by sending more weapons to Israel and this must stop. We need to open borders to allow medical aid, food and water into Gaza. We need to shatter the false premise that Israel can only exist for Jewish people at the expense of displacing, subjugating, controlling and killing Palestinians as it has for over 75 years. Everything possible needs to be done to condemn this indiscriminate violence against a trapped population of 2 million people who are now completely cut off from the world.

Our old and young are being killed, but we will never forget.

استودعتك غزةعائلتنا وأطفالنا يا الله، ربي رب السموات والارض

“I have entrusted my beloved Gaza, our family and our sweet children to God, creator of the world and the heavens.”

– Dana Elborno
Excerpted from “More Than 1,000 Gazan Children Are Dead.
How Can We Even Begin to Mourn?”
TruthOut
October 17, 2023



And finally, Maoz Inon is an Israeli peace activist who lost both of his parents, Bilha and Yakovi Inon (right), on the first day of the Hamas attacks.

Maoz was interviewed October 18 by Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. Following is part of what he said.

I’m overwhelmed with what happened to me and to my family and to my community and classmates, friends in our community, Israeli communities around Gaza. Nothing prepared me for this moment that I would be here speaking with you about my tragedy. I wished I was speaking with you about the initiatives, the peace and shared society initiatives I’ve been taking part in in the last 20 years. And honestly, I’m overwhelmed with everything that’s going on.

My parents were loving people and an amazing couple, really adored and admired by their colleagues, their friends, their community, and of course by us, my five brothers and sisters and the 11 grandchildren. They didn’t want to harm anyone. They didn’t want to fight with anyone. We have close and very tight relationship – we call it even a family relationship – with the Bedouin in the Negev. I have many friends, colleagues, partners in Palestine, in Jordan, in Egypt. And what’s happening now is just devastating. It’s just devastating.

. . . Me and my family, we seek no revenge. We just seek peace. We seek for hope. We must change the terminology we are using to positive terminology, for reconciliation, for recognition, for partnership and for peace. I’m crying, and I’m begging you. Just will their wellness, not to blame anyone, just to stop the war and to build a different future, to break the cycle of blood, to break this game of blood and to build a new future with hope.

. . . Of course I’m against the occupation. But it’s irrelevant at the moment. . . . I’m afraid there will be many, many more victims. And what we all should be focusing now is to stop the war. Very simple message. And we must cry it. We must cry our message to everyone that has a heart and that can listen.




NEXT:
Quote of the Day: Ta-Nehisi Coates
– November 2, 2023



SEE ALSO:
More Voices of Reason and Compassion
on the Crisis in Israel and Gaza



Related Off-site Links:
What Is a War Crime, and Who Gets Held Accountable? – Scott Neuman (NPR News, October 20, 2023).
How U.S. Media Legitimise Israel’s Barbarism Against the Palestinians – Gregory Shupak (Middle East Eye, October 20, 2023).
Israeli Journalist Amira Hass: How Can the World Stand By and Witness Israel’s Slaughter in Gaza? – Democracy Now! (October 19, 2023).
Annexation, Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide: Mustafa Barghouti Decries Israel’s Deadly Campaign in Gaza – Democracy Now! (October 19, 2023).
Palestinians Trapped in Gaza Find Nowhere Is Safe During Israel’s Relentless Bombing – AP News via MPR News (October 19, 2023).
Ceasefire in Gaza Now – Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan (Democracy Now!, October 19, 2023).
“Not In Our Name!” Hundreds Arrested at U.S. Capitol as Jewish-Led Protest Demands Gaza Cease-Fire – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, October 18, 2023).
800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating “Crime of Genocide” in Gaza – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, October 18, 2023).
U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine: Gaza War Risks “Largest Instance of Ethnic Cleansing” in Mideast History – Democracy Now! (October 18, 2023).
Selective Empathy Is Not Empathetic at All – Belén Fernández (Al Jazeera via Common Dreams, October 17, 2023).
Hospitals in Gaza Face Collapse as Water, Power and Medicine Run Out – Najib Jobain, Samya Kullab and Joseph Krauss (AP News, October 16, 2023).
As Gaza Turmoil Deepens, Some Leaders Dial Back Pro-Israel Rhetoric – But Won’t Call for Cease-Fire – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, October 15, 2023).
Gaza Is a Prison Under Siege. This Is My Letter to the World Outside – Ahmed Abu Artema (TruthOut, October 15, 2023).
The Outside World Must Walk Israel Back from the Abyss. It Cannot Be Part of the Choir of Incitement – Daniel Levy and Zaha Hassan (The Irish Times, October 14, 2023).
“Humanity Must Prevail” in Gaza, Says UN Official as Refugee Shelters Become Israeli Defense Force Targets – Julia Conley (Common Dreams, October 14, 2023).
“A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza – Democracy Now! (October 16, 2023).
I Wish Americans Could See the Humanity of Palestinians as They Do With Israelis – Sa’ed Atshan (TruthOut, October 13, 2023).

UPDATES: “Nowhere in Gaza Is Safe”: Palestinian Death Toll Tops 5,000 as Israel Rejects Calls for Ceasefire – Democracy Now! (October 23, 2023).
Scores of UN Workers and Journalists Killed in Israel’s Indiscriminate Strikes on Gaza – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, October 23, 2023).
Not in My Brother’s Name: Sibling of Peace Activist Killed by Hamas Demands Israel Stop Bombing Gaza – Democracy Now! (October 23, 2023).
Sky News Apologises for Palestine Blunder by Kay Burley – Novara Media (October 24, 2023).
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Groups That Give Me Hope When Killing and War Abound – Rob Okun (Common Dreams, October 24, 2023).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Midst of the “Great Unraveling,” a Visit to the Prayer Tree
• Prayer of the Week – October 16, 2023
• Something to Think About – October 12, 2023
• Eric Levitz: Quote of the Day – October 11, 2023
• Phyllis Bennis: “If We Are Serious About Ending This Spiraling Violence, We Need to Look at Root Causes”
• “Nothing About Today is ‘Unprovoked’”
• “The Mistreatment and Discrimination Against Palestinians Is Not Unprecedented. It’s Baked Into the Foundation of the Political System in Israel”
• Progressive Perspectives on the Ongoing Israeli-Palestinian “Nightmare” (2021)
• Something to Think About – July 29, 2018
• Noura Erakat: Quote of the Day – May 15, 2018
• For Some Jews, Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians is Yet Another Jewish Tragedy
• Remembering the Six-Day War and Its Ongoing Aftermath
• David Norris: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2014

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