Who shall live and who shall die?

Today is Yom Kippur, Day of Awe, the Holiest of Holies.  I’m not fasting, for reasons my Muslim sisters will understand.  I’m not at synagogue, because this day is too sacred to me to spend with people I don’t trust.  And I’m writing, although I’d vowed to stay away from the computer except to read the news.

And oh, the news.  That is why I am now writing.

Yom Kippur is, in so many ways, an oddity and anachronism to the rest of my modern, community-centered, social-justice-focused, Judaism.  It is full of archaic language, mortal threats, and a thunderous, unknowing, and rather vengeful masculine God.  It is the culmination of the 10 days that begin the new year, when on Rosh Hashana the book of life is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.  Terrifying, ominous stuff.  We fast, dress in shroud-like clothing, beat our chests, and ponder fate.  We recite the most macabre of all prayers, the Unataneh Tokef.

The Unataneh Tokef literally asks, “Who shall live and who shall die?”  It does not stop there.  “Who shall live out their time, and who shall die young?  Who by water and who by fire?  Who by the sword and who by wild beast?  Who by hunger and who by thirst?  Who by earthquake and who by pestilence?  . . . Who shall be humbled and who shall be exalted?”  After these gory options, we are then thrown a small bone and told that repentance, prayer, and charity shall lessen the severity of the decree.

Meditating on the meaning of this prayer and its utility is a yearly past-time for Jews, clerical and lay alike.  A cursory internet search will turn up many sermons and essays more meaningful and better thought-out than my hastily-penned reflection.  But it is not the fate of the victims I want to discuss, the randomness that might take them down and their actions that might save them.  It’s the agency of the aggressors.

Judaism differs from Christianity in some critical ways beyond not having Jesus or Christmas trees.  One of the most important aspects to me is the notion that we cannot ask God for forgiveness until we have attempted to right the wrong ourselves.  Whatever your feelings on God (and I personally don’t buy into a monotheistic deity), this seems a good practice.  It disallows us from making mistakes or acting in intentionally harmful ways and then just praying our way out of it (I realize that most Christians also don’t subscribe to this, so forgive me the oversimplification of our differences).  The onus is on us.  We don’t get to come to the Day of Awe to get absolved having done no work ourselves, nor do we get to approach the randomness of fate as though we have no role.

So now to the news.  This morning, an airstrike in Aleppo killed 22 people.  An attack on worshipers in a mosque in Afghanistan killed 14.  Eight people were killed in a suicide bombing in Nigeria.  A Palestinian was killed in a demonstration in Silwan.  The death toll in Haiti has passed 1,000.  And that’s just the homepage of Al Jazeera.

Something is wrong with these headlines.  Not merely that these are human lives extinguished.  But that the headlines omit something critical — someone killed these people.  They did not go by the randomness of fate or the unknowable nature of God.  They were murdered — yes, even those in Haiti, although a hurricane is the proximate cause.  Syria is a proxy battleground for Russia and the U.S., and lives are expendable pawns as we haggle for dominance.  Afghanistan is hell – it had already been invaded and occupied numerous times before the U.S.’s undeclared war began in 2001, ostensibly to capture the al-Qaeda plotters (remember al-Qaeda? no one else does either) even though they were from Saudi Arabia, a country that continues to get our full diplomatic and financial support even as it flattens Yemen (know about Yemen?  neither does anyone else) in its own proxy struggle.  Silwan is being ethnically cleansed with full U.S. support, and an Israeli soldier killed that demonstrator.  And Haiti, meskeen Haiti — first black country to throw off its colonial oppressors, first independent colony in the Americas, has been punished for this ever since with crushing debt, harsh international policies, and aid experiments and incompetence that have increased its vulnerability to natural disasters a hundredfold.

And we, the U.S., we are all responsible.  Our putative future leadership has unflinchingly vowed continued support for these sins.  Hillary Clinton has cited Henry Kissinger, who is probably responsible for as many deaths as Hitler, as a foreign policy mentor.  Donald Trump has promised to keep “bombing and bombing and bombing” Daesh (ISIS), which really just means bombing and bombing and bombing various Middle Eastern countries, residents be damned.  We cannot excuse Hillary Clinton her willingness to act as a vengeful god because she is “the lesser evil.”  While fate does act in random and sometimes tragic ways, we are not Fate.  We cannot excuse our transgressions as the inexplicable hand of God or the unknowable ways of the universe.  It is not those in the paths of the bombs that need to engage in repentance, prayer, and charity to save themselves, it is those manufacturing, selling, and guiding those bombs.

My favorite part of the high holiday period is the turning towards communal repentance.  There is the Ashamnu, an alphabetical list of our sins, chanted together and in the “we” tense.  And there is Tashlich, the ritual casting away of sins on the water, which for the past decade or so I have done with like-minded social-justice Jews, owning our role in racism, neoconservatism and neoliberalism (neo-colonialism), environmental destruction, etc.  These serve to focus us on our sins, but that is not enough.  More than that, they highlight our agency, charting the path in front of us to ask forgiveness not through words, but through deeds.

May 5777 be a year of communal repentance and action for all of us so that when we approach our next new year, we do not have to ask for forgiveness for complacency.  The only non-option is doing nothing.  Shana tovah.

 

 

 

No one thought Germany would murder its Jews, either

In recent weeks, I have sounded like I am descending into paranoid madness. I hope I am paranoid, and I hope I am wrong, but I would rather take that risk than not sound the alarm.

I don’t know how to make this any clearer:

Almost no one — certainly not the well-assimilated German Jews — thought the Nazi Holocaust could happen. People urged moderate responses, dismissed more open calls for racist violence as fringe, and assumed their neighbors and institutions would right things.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  If you think that people knew what would happen and just didn’t react, or that good people had easy options for reacting but failed to, you are wrong.  Learn your history.  Now.

Islamophobic hysteria is not just fringe. It’s been cultivating for at least 14 years. Every time President Obama denied being a Muslim without saying “but if I were so what?” Every time someone makes a dismissive remark about hijab but fails to comment on other religious attire.  Every time Zionism is defended because of the irrational death wish ideology projected onto Palestinian Muslims.  Every time the white murderers are mentally ill and the Muslim murderers are terrorists.   Every time someone talks about how “moderate Muslims” are ok but fails to talk about moderate anyone-elses. Every time Southwest Airlines pulls an Arabic-speaker off the plane because they “have to take all security concerns seriously.”  Every time Sikhs, Arab Christians, Hindus stress their non-Muslim-ness.   Every time a poll can even be conducted on whether Islam should be legal in the U.S. (and nearly half of Iowan Republicans say “no”).

Islamophobic ideologies are no longer just held by grassroots good ole’ boys.  When 31 Governors — well over half of our states — call for excluding all Syrian refugees, their sheer ignorance and inhumanity only flies because they’re talking about Muslims (they think — and some have stated exemptions for Syrian Christians).  When leading Presidential candidates can openly state that Muslims should not be President (bye bye, 1st Amendment) or enter the country, and their poll numbers rise, we’re not witnessing David Duke’s short-lived and much-condemned Presidential run anymore.  We’re witnessing the mainstreaming of racial hatred.

Islamophobic violence is now acceptable by law.  It is legal for heavily armed white men to surround mosques.  America’s gun-insanity aside, it is not legal for Black children to play with toy guns — the fact that this particular law is unwritten doesn’t give it any less force, since we all know this crime carries the death penalty.  We all know that no one but white people can openly carry arms, and we all know that no religious institution but a mosque can be legally surrounded by armed “civilians.”  Creepy internet trolls can tell Muslim activist Linda Sarsour that they are going to behead her — yes, behead — and oh well, that’s just crazy internet trolls exercising their freedom of speech (that same 1st Amendment that no longer applies to Muslims).

This country has been so hell-bent on racist violence and insanity over the past few years that it’s been hard to tease out the particularly virulent strain of Islamophobia.  Police and vigilantes are openly murdering black youth and getting away with it, not only in courts of law, but even more disturbingly in courts of public opinion.  Anti-immigrant sentiment is rounding up and cracking down on desperate Latin Americans, enabling us to place checkpoints in interior U.S. communities and have people accept racial profiling as the cost of security.  This is all part and parcel of the rise of white supremacy, and it’s all terrifying.  I am not minimizing the violence against any of these communities, but I think it’s critical that we draw particular attention to the crusade against Muslims lest we miss what we’re marching up to: a call for internment, maybe a call for genocide.

There.  I said it.

I’ve been reluctant to share the level of my fear on this because I have so many close Muslim friends, and I want you all to be able to sleep at night, and I want to be wrong, and I want to be able to stop this, and I don’t want you to be angry with me for suggesting that I think you are in grave danger.  With only one of you have I even uttered this out loud, and sadly, you didn’t correct me.  We both pledged our determination to stay here and fight, and I told you I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, and I am terrified for you every day.

Maybe I am crazy. But I have been raised to be crazy on this matter. I have been raised by paranoid children of Holocaust survivors and we’ve always kinda known that they could come for us, or someone else, again — even when we’ve convinced ourselves that’s in the past. My grandmother is still alive. I hope that her dementia is so advanced that she cannot see this march of fascism and racism gripping her new country.

Most of all, I hope I’m wrong.

Nightmares of Gaza

Last night I woke up shaking and crying to the brilliant flashes of light and booms.  It was a monsoon thunderstorm.  I thought I was in Gaza.  It was only desert summer rains.  I thought I was among the 500,000 internally displaced people, scrambling like mad to avoid adding their numbers to the over 1,500 murdered relatives friends neighbors, running from building to destroyed building to targeted hospital to flattened school, seeking shelter from the 86,000 armed soldiers and the 200 tons of bombs raining daily.  Like the monsoon thunderstorm, but deadly, evil, horrible.  I thought I was in Gaza.  I thought I will need therapy for the rest of my life for this one night.  I was not in Gaza.  I was safe in the U.S., safely inside the tanks, behind the scopes of the guns, directing the unmanned drones, flying the Apache helicopters.  Safely armored as I rained hellfire and destruction on the 1.8 million people of Gaza for over 24 nights and days.  And as I spent another sleepless night I thought I will never comprehend the horrors that the people of Gaza live every night.  And I will never forgive myself for not stopping them.  

Genocide

Genocide:

“Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group, (b) causing serious mental or bodily harm, (c) deliberately inflicting upon the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Source: UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%2078/volume-78-I-1021-English.pdf

How much does it take?

How long do the borders need to be sealed to make it a ghetto?

How limited do the shipments of food and medical aid need to be to bring about physical destruction?

How many water sources and power supplies must be destroyed?

How many rounded up and imprisoned without charge, indefinitely?

How many protests, journalists, and human rights inquiries quelled?

How many government officials must call for murder or expulsion of an entire population?

How many denials that the group of people even exists, or have any claim to their homeland?

How long must the refugees be kept away from their homes?  

How many homes need to be destroyed?

How many children must go to bed to the lullabies of drone strikes?

How many innocent people must be killed?

For how long will we stand by and wait for the numbers to cross some magical threshold before we act?

For how long will we maintain that only ovens and gas chambers count?

For how long?

For how many?

Why?

 

 

 

Tattoo

I’ve visited the issue of grief’s visibility a lot on this blog.  I’ve also been drawn to the comparisons of grief to a physical loss or impediment.  The healing, or perhaps “coping” is really the word, process involves a subjugation of that visibility and a circumventing of the physical limitations.  It is a sign that I’m doing “better” that people don’t see the pain in my features anymore; it is a sign of improvement that I can interact with the world in a way that doesn’t reveal my amputations.

It is a sign of improvement, but it also feels like a betrayal and like a disguise.  And so, to honor that this loss is physical and keep it visible, I got a memorial tattoo for the 2 year anniversary of Alex’s death.  I wanted a visible, physical marker that I have lost, but I also wanted it to demonstrate the enduring Alex, his extremism and his humor.  When it came down to it, I wanted an image that would capture my loss without making me cry every time I looked at it.  Since I can’t draw for shit, an image that captured that spirit was a while in the making and largely entrusted to the tattoo artist.  I gave him some concepts, a story, and a glorified stick-figure drawing.

I’ve known I wanted a memorial tattoo for some time, but I didn’t realize how right it would be.  I just thought of it as something else to do; as someone told me this weekend, when you’re stuck, your only non-option is doing nothing.  It isn’t just that it serves as a prompt for me to talk about Alex with strangers, as I initially hoped; it also allows me to feel that I am carrying Alex with me at all times.

I still talk about Alex frequently, since our lives were constantly intertwined for some 15 years and only slightly less tightly woven for the next 14, so many of my stories feature him.  Sometimes I talk about him in the present tense, which occasionally leads new people to ask where he is, a question I have answered variously with “that’s a bit of an existential question,” or “dead,” or “his body is buried in a suburban cemetery,” depending on whether I’m feeling snarky, or kind, or curt. None of those answers feels good.  They don’t even feel honest — “dead” is not a where, and his body is not him.

I don’t get much cheesier than this, so grab a cracker and some wine and hang on: this tattoo has allowed me to answer the question of where Alex is with, “Here.  He’s here, with me, and with everyone who knew and loves him.”  (Those mismatched tenses are intentional.)  And that feels honest, and, in the way that we make do with loss, good.

The point of this road trip was to change my narrative, the story of who I am and how I ended up here, wherever here is.  I have suffered, I have lost, and I will not be made whole again.  I won’t pretend otherwise.  But I did not want to lead with my self-pity.  Now, through distance, friends, and the unlikely aids of needles and ink, I’m at least beginning to change my lead, edit out the minor villains, and spend more chapters building my co-protagonist’s character rather than focusing on his cataclysmic demise.

Tunnels

Let’s talk about tunnels.

Since the latest excuse for the current Israeli assault on Gaza is the tunnels, let’s talk about the tunnels.  Let’s talk about a population of 1.8 million people in a 140 square mile zone who cannot leave via land, air, or sea.  Let’s talk about a place where outsiders are not allowed in.  Let’s talk about a place where farmers and fisherfolk cannot get their wares outside the perimeters for sale, and strawberries and watermelons rot awaiting passage.  Let’s talk about a place where basic goods cannot be brought in; sometimes cloth, sometimes concrete, sometimes medication.  Where fuel is (over)priced and allocated by the very same force that controls the entrances and exits to the territory, allocated at such small amounts that electricity is never available all the time, and during times of acute crisis is only available a few hours a day.  Where my friend, now an American citizen, couldn’t enter for his brothers’ weddings.  Where the unemployment rate is at 60%, and even government employees have their pay frozen by foreign powers who don’t like the current ruling party.  

Let’s talk about people with sumud (steadfastness), who have lived in this situation for over 60 years, increasingly awful for the last 7.  These people can die, or they can dig.  Tunnels represent a literal underground lifeline for Palestinians.  The light at the end of the tunnel has been used to smuggle goods, livestock, people; my friend did get to the weddings, because he entered through the tunnels.  

If you lived in Gaza, would you wither or would you build tunnels?  And when the screws were tightened even further, elevating the usual mostly starvation style of violence into epic bursts of bombing flattening whole neighborhoods and their inhabitants, would the idea of using those tunnels for weaponry cross your mind?  We ask amazing feats of sacrifice from Palestinians, and amazingly, most deliver: we ask that they bear their wrongful imprisonment in silence and peace.  The tunnels are still primarily used for civilian purposes, or would be, if they aren’t all destroyed.  So let’s talk about tunnels, and why they are there in the first place; then let’s talk about destroying the tunnels by opening the fences.    

 

Update on the Khalils in Jabaliya Refugee Camp

Many people have asked me how Basel’s family is doing.  I wasn’t sure if an update alert would be sent if I edited the original post (“Your home is about to be destroyed”), so I’m just adding a quick one now:

The Khalils of Jabaliya Refugee Camp are still alive as of now.  They have a new baby, Basel’s niece Taleen; she is healthy.  They have not left their home; there is nowhere to go.  Others in Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya have fled to UN shelters, but as we know from 2008-2009, UN shelters are not safe.  Nowhere in Gaza is safe.  

Israel is using white phosphorus gas again.  The magnificent, firework-spectacle screaming streaks through the night sky, the ones that burn flesh off on contact, melt babies alive, keep wounds open even on the survivors for years with nerve damage and bleeding reminders of the world’s abandonment.  That stuff that was declared a war crime when Israel used it on Gaza in 2008-2009.  Where do they get it?  

Israel is also using another unidentified poison gas.

Basel’s family is trying to shield part of their home with plastic sheeting and put the children there, so they don’t breath the poisoned gasses.  Please tell your local media and elected officials about the Khalils.  

 

 

Jewish privilege in Palestine solidarity

I just got off the phone with a dear old friend.  She thanked me for keeping her updated with what is happening in Gaza, and for sharing my views, because, as she rightly pointed out, the news in the U.S. is impossibly tangled. The pictures accompanying headlines about rocket fire into Israel have several times now been pictures of flattened Gazan homes (thank you, Diane Sawyer and Fox News).  

But this friend didn’t just thank me because I was able to sort out some of the facts.  She also thanked me because it was important to hear this from a Jew.  This is a smart, caring person, a lawyer, human rights activist, and religious Christian.  She has known me for years, known my views on this for years, and yet she still feels like she needs my permission to get involved.  

And thus, we get to Jewish privilege on the issue of Israel/Palestine.  The kneejerk cry of “Anti-Semitism!” is still so common a reflex that people shy away from making their unease with Israel known, or even learning more.  Information from organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace becomes more trustworthy than that from “neutral” sources, and certainly more than that from Palestinian/Arab/Muslim sources.  Signs like the one my dad held this weekend, “Occupation: Not in My Name” alert passersby that a Jew has weighed in, criticized Israel, and therefore said passersby can now engage in conversation, take literature, think about the issue.   

This is deeply problematic.  It is problematic because it means we need permission from people within the oppressor group to criticize oppression.  It is problematic because it negates the voices of others, but especially and most importantly because it negates the voices of the victims themselves.  It deems the Palestinian narrative less trustworthy, in this weird belief that bias exists only on the side of the oppressed.  

And yet.  And yet.  As deeply uncomfortable as it makes me to write on my demo sign that “I am Jewish AND. . . ,” my friend reminded me that this is what gets those people who are disquieted by the news but not engaged to stop and read the rest of my sign.  It should not matter that I am Jewish; it should only matter that Gaza is constantly under siege and is now undergoing a massacre.  But if I refuse to use my privilege in this case, I may have lost a group of nice nervous people who really do feel they need my permission to get involved.  It’s not really their fault; Holocaust guilt runs deep, as it well should, and it is cleverly and constantly exploited by defenders of Israel.  

Jews involved in Palestine solidarity work get invitations to radio programs, to churches, to civic organizations.  Jews involved in Palestine solidarity work get pats on the back for being so courageous. It can be flattering, and we can let it go to our heads and forget that Palestinians are being ignored in their own struggle.  We must use our privilege in a constructive way, one that alerts concerned people to listen to Palestinian voices.  My mother once refused to speak on a panel unless the hosts invited Palestinian speakers, and then provided a list of local qualified speakers. Jews are the bouncers at this event: we get the crowd to listen up by shouting our Jewishness into the loud-speaker, then we hand the mike over to the Palestinians.  I would like this not to be the case, I would like us not to have to grant permission to criticize Israel, but even more I would like the Occupation and war crimes to stop.  If that means I have to write “I am Jewish AND . . .” on my sign next time, I guess I will.

Your home is about to be destroyed; you have no shelter

On this, the 2 year anniversary of my brother’s death, I awoke to a message from a Palestinian friend.  His family, in Jabaliya Refugee Camp in the Northern Gaza Strip, has just received the phone call from Israel: their home is about to be destroyed, get out.

The family of Ali Rajab and Leila Khalil lives in the Hay Raid al Saliheen neighborhood of Jabaliya Refugee Camp.  They are refugees, from Israel-proper.  They are a family of paramedics. They have no connection to rockets, to fighting, or even to a political party.  

Basel’s family received 5 phone calls.  The first said to get out by July 15th, their home would be destroyed then.  The most recent one said they had 4 hours.  I said, Basel, they need to get out now.  Israel doesn’t give people the time it says it will.  Basel said, they can’t.  There is nowhere safe to go in Gaza.  Nowhere.  In 2008, people in his neighborhood taking shelter in a UN school were blown to smithereens.  Basel’s dad, Ali, nearly got blown up a few days ago when the Red Crescent Ambulance he was driving was narrowly missed by an Israeli missile.  

I really don’t know if his family plans to try to leave their house and risk assassination on the streets, where Israel is now firing missiles at groups of people, or to stay and risk death at home.  Again I asked Basel if they had anywhere they could go.  Again he told me that there is not a safe place in all of Gaza, and there is no way out.  

Israel called the family on the landline.  If their intelligence has the phone number to the house, and the address, then surely it has the intelligence to know there is nothing in that house but civilians. Israeli public relations states that the “warning” calls and bombs (gentle, warning bombs, like a soft kiss in the morning) are an indication that it is humane, because it gives people time to evacuate.  But this would require somewhere safe to go, and unlike Israel, Gaza has no bomb shelters, and no safe places.  It also implies that somehow, a civilian home in which all the civilians should be given a chance to leave, is still a target; that doesn’t even make any sense.  Are the Khalils’ bedsheets or family photos threatening to Israel?

My mom suggested that Israel “warns” its victims because it is engaging in a new form of torture, psychological torture.  Like a cat torturing a mouse before dispatching of it, except in this case the mice are people.  Basel says Israel is doing all this to try to turn the majority Gaza population against Hamas, cause an uprising, but this might only work if the Gazans weren’t so busy trying not to be killed; also, it’s one hell of an evil way to provoke a civilian uprising.  I search for rational, if still evil, motivation in the action of nation-states, but I come up empty-handed.  I suppose that genocide lacks reason, except perhaps to whip the majority population up into a patriotic blind frenzy.  And I can no longer think of a word that better describes trapping a huge population, denying them essential supplies, and then engaging in massive bombing campaigns against them other than genocide.  (See the UN Convention on the Crime and Punishment of Genocide, http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html)

Basel called me I think mostly because he needed to talk to someone.  I hope it was not because he thought I could do something, because I feel completely helpless.  A family — Leila, Ali, Ghassan, Mohammed, Ahmed, Hannan – has just been told that their countdown clock is on, and given no ways to stop it.  All we can do is tell people.  I’m telling you.  Please tell someone.  

I feel that I am watching helplessly as a military I fund commits genocide.  I have not forgiven the Americans, Germans, and other citizens of the world who watched this happen to my grandparents. I do not want to be among the helpless enablers this time.  

It’s the 2 year anniversary of my brother’s death.  But as my mom, who I called this morning, said, Alex will still be dead in a week.  For now we focus on the people who have a chance to remain alive.  Please call the White House at 202-456-1111, the State Department at 202-647-4000 (ask for the comment line), your Senator at http://www.senate.gov/senators and Representative atwww.house.gov/representatives, and write your local media. Please tell people about the Khalils.  

Everything you have been told about Gaza is a racist lie

I have an app on my fancyphone called iGaza.  Every time I hear its alarm beep, I get scared.  Being a white person safely housed in non-ghetto America, I had the liberty of shutting my eyes a bit longer today to block out the latest update from the killing zone.  Gazans can’t roll over and go back to sleep; this morning the death toll reached over 100 from the past 4 days.

100 lives.  One hundred human beings extinguished.  Gone, nil, axed, snuffed, murdered.  My brother’s death shattered my world, my mom’s world, my dad’s world.  Imagine how many galaxies have just been destroyed.

And yet people have the audacity to say that this is necessary.  Some decent people, some people I love and worship with; politicians as well, but they’re not even worth discussing.  This morning Ma’an News had a story of a young mother who died moving her kids to a “safer” room in the house; she saved all but one.  I wonder if these defenders of Israeli aggression can look me in the eye and tell me this was necessary.  I know they’ll try, because they don’t believe a word of it.  Because their vision is clouded by a lifetime of lies, lies that don’t even really make sense unless you swallow the racist syrup that binds them.

I am and was raised Jewish, in a synagogue, attending a Jewish summer camp, so I’ve been exposed to these tales.  Let’s start to dismantle some of my favorite lies:

1.  “There is no such thing as ‘Palestinians.’ ”  Yesterday I spoke with a bright young Palestinian woman who has been told this by someone who seemed to think it was an appropriate thing to say.  (She’s actually not the first Palestinian-American I know who has encountered this.)  The fact that someone would tell someone there is no such thing as their ethnic group is astounding; it rings vaguely of the very few times I’ve been told there was no Holocaust (my grandparents are survivors).  Palestinians are people who are from areas that are within historic Palestine, be it the West Bank, Israel proper, or the Gaza Strip.  Not Jordan.  Not Lebanon.  Still want to fight because Palestine isn’t a “country?”  The entire Levant has been carved and re-carved for centuries, no current country borders have existed for very long, get over it.

2.  “Hamas is a militant terrorist organization.”  Hamas is a political party.  It was democratically elected (which is more than we can say about our government) in 2005; the response was punishing sanctions from Israel and the U.S.  Hamas has a military wing that has killed people, innocent people (so do we).  Its sole purpose is not the destruction of Israel; in fact it has brokered and maintained ceasefires with Israel frequently, far more often than Israel has maintained the ceasefires.  Not everyone affiliated with Hamas has any connection to violence.  Making the comparison to our own set-up, a “Hamas-supporter” is kind of like a registered Democrat, a “Hamas” official could be an EPA employee.  Neither Democrats nor EPA employees are particularly threatening, nor are they legitimate military targets.

3. “Hamas (or Islamic Jihad, or whoever) operates from crowded civilian areas using human shields.”  Gaza IS a crowded civilian area; this is the doing of Israel, which does not let people in or out.  It has 1.8 million people in an area of about 140 square miles. There is no evidence that they are using pharmacies, marked tv cars, ambulances, hospitals, or residential homes to plan attacks on Israel, yet Israel targets all of those things. That anecdote you heard about the ambulance?  Put it in the bs file, along with the school books story.  As far as human shields go, this morning a young mother used herself as a human shield to save her children.  That’s the recent evidence we have on human shields.

4.  “Most humane army in the world” la di fricking da.  The only humane army in the world is Costa Rica’s.  “Precision weaponry and intelligence.”  Look, either Israel is deliberately targeting civilians or it has some really terrible intelligence and is using it with gross negligence.  Given the death tolls and the targets, you can’t have it both ways.  In either case, it’s committing war crimes.

The overall picture that we get of Gaza is a land teeming with terrorists who chose that perch because of its unique ability to launch mostly ineffective missiles into Israel, a neglected ghetto of Israel, I might add; they have no legitimate grievances, only an irrational and obsessive hatred of Israel.  The primary driving force of most Gazans, as of most human beings, is living a good life; this is no small feat for a refugee population whose resources and movement are under total control by an occupying power.  And yes, Israel still controls land, air, and sea, in spite of the “withdrawal.” Kind of like a prison is still a prison even though the prison guards stick to the hallways.

5.  “Unfortunate killings, necessary for defense.” There is no such thing as an unfortunate killing of a person.  It is unfortunate when you hit a deer with your car.  It is tragic at best and murderous pure evil at worst when a human being is killed.  Unless. . . it’s not a human being!  I loop back to this again and again and again.  I cannot fathom a way that someone can brush aside the deaths of all those children and young people unless they don’t think they’re real people.  Btw, both Islamic Jihad and Hamas claim and name when one of the dead is one of their fighters, and those are few and far between on the death toll; young men in their 20’s, obnoxious though they can sometimes be, are not all or even mostly combatants.  And no, Palestinians don’t rejoice when their children are killed; a more racist understanding of people would be hard for me to imagine. (You say that Palestinian martyrs are celebrated?  American military parents and widows, Veteran’s Day, 4th of July, right back at ya; doesn’t mean we don’t mourn our dead soldiers.)

And that “necessary for defense” bit?  Given that zero Israelis have been killed by the Gazan rockets this time, I’d say that the combo of Israel’s advanced missile defense shield, air sirens, bomb shelters, and the inefficacy of the Gazan rockets are doing a pretty good job of defense.  And Israel could just accept the ceasefire offered by the Hamas-P.A. government, but Netanyahu stated unequivocally yesterday that a ceasefire is off the table.

6.  “Rocks kill people.” You really think that a boy with a slingshot and a soldier with a gun are on equal footing?  Yeah?  I have some ocean front property in Arizona I’d like to sell you.

7. “Palestinians teach their kids to hate.”  Having your house blown up, your sisters arrested, your brothers beaten, your orchards destroyed, your requests to travel denied, and your hospital generators regularly run out of fuel are really far more effective teachers of resentment and anger.  Even in the face of all those professors of hatred, though, as an American Jew I have been treated with nothing but kindness from Palestinians; that is love, that is humanity, and that is hope.

Anyhow, we don’t get to kill members of the Westboro Baptist Church, and we know they teach their kids to hate.

8.  “Israel has a right to defend itself.”  Palestinians don’t?  How can Israel have a right to defend itself when Palestinians, under constant attack from Israel (Gaza takes missiles and gunfire from Israel every single week of the year, whether we hear about it or not; West Bank residents are rounded up and roughed up regularly) do not?  This makes no sense, unless only certain types of people have the right to defend themselves.

There’s a simple racism test that I like to use in cases like this: reverse the parties (like Matthew McConaughey did in “A Time to Kill,” because, you know, the jurors don’t think little black girls don’t deserve to get gang-raped until we picture them as little white girls).  Would 100 dead Israelis not be mentioned until the 4th paragraph of a New York Times article (they did it again today!)?  If you think so, about that ocean front property . . .