The War On Gaza Is A War On Our Humanity
Some years ago in this west coast college town, a putative friend that enjoyed setting me up introduced me to a young woman he met in the local Irish bar. She was straight off the boat from Ireland, and was the picture of an Irish lass – red hair, pale skin and green eyes.
'Martin is Irish,' my Italian friend said with an impish smile. How he knew what was coming I don't know, but the young woman looked me up and down, gave me the dirtiest look I've ever received, and spat the words, ' Black Irish.'
'Black Irish' had been a term of pride in my mostly Irish, Mediterranean-skinned family, so I was perplexed, to say the least, at being called what felt like was the equivalent of a nigger.
I phoned a woman I'd been corresponding with in Galway and asked, 'What does it mean when an Irish person calls someone 'Black Irish?''
'We don't use that phrase,' she quickly replied. When pressed, she said, 'Call me back in a week and I'll tell you.'
When I did she gave me quite a history lesson. 'During the Inquisition in Spain,' she began, 'many Jews converted to Catholicism so they wouldn't be tortured and killed. But that wasn't good enough for the Inquisitors, so they tortured people to gain 'confessions' from Jews who had converted but were suspected of still practicing Judaism in secret.'
'Many Jews and converted Catholics fled and settled on the west coast of Ireland, where they were tolerated but not assimilated. Antisemites in Ireland have called their swarthy descendents 'Black Irish' ever since.'
A DNA test wouldn't matter, it's likely that my anti-Semitic family, Irish but for one Quebecoise grandfather, was descended from Spanish Jews. It's a sweet irony. Having grown up hearing antisemitic slurs, I marked the beginning of manhood when I first called out my domineering father and said I never wanted to hear his bigoted crap again.
But there is a bitter historical irony between the Inquisition, when Ferdinand and Isabella tried to expel all Jews from Spain in 1492 in order to unify the kingdom under Christianity, and Israel's plans, 'with God's help,' of 'scorching the conditions for life in Gaza, forcing people to leave, and starving and killing those who remain' in the name of a unified Judea.
The slaughter of nearly 1200 Jews by Hamas monsters has made Israel's slaughter of more than 50,000 people in Gaza 'complicated,' to use Barack Obama's weaselly word. No, the 'nuances' of my own ancestry have made the horrors of identification clearer.
This endless evil cannot be justified by the excremental excuse of American and European leaders of 'Israel's right to defend itself.' American bombs and shells and bullets have killed thousands of children in Gaza. That means, as America slides into authoritarianism on this Memorial Day under the tyrant Trump, that our military is completely complicit in mass murder.
It's not just the governments of the US and EU that are complicit in Israel's genocide however; everyone who identifies with a particular national or religious fragment of humanity is complicit. Group identification is the root of conflict, war and genocide.
There is not a war in Gaza; it's a war on Gaza. And the Israeli government, by dismissing any criticism of its criminal campaign as antisemitic, has greatly increased antisemitism in the world.
This nonstop assault on Gaza marks not just the end of the post-world war international system, or even the end of western civilization, but the end of the illusion of human progress. The saying, 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice' has become not only a cliché, but also a falsehood.
The biblical barbarity of Israel's rubble on rubble, child's corpse on child's corpse destruction of Gaza is shot through with references to a special dispensation from God to inhabit all of Judea. And the more maliciously and malevolently the Netanyahu regime acts, the more Israel claims they are being 'misunderstood, discriminated against, and surrounded by enemies.'
Jewish people have a truly tragic history of victimization, but it has fed a bottomless, vengeful sense of victimhood on the right. Israel has no right to act with impunity in Gaza, deflecting any criticism of its diabolical crusade against Palestinians by charges of antisemitism.
Whether Hamas is using the Gazan people as human shields or not, Israel has no right to mass murder. And just because Hamas has distributed food and medicine, Israel has no right to use starvation as a weapon or bomb hospitals.
Though Israel has upended international political and moral arrangements, the pillars and foundation were rotten before the unspeakable malevolence by Hamas of October 7 triggered Israel's never-ending revenge on Gazans.
How could the leader of a people that have been persecuted for centuries, culminating in the Holocaust, become so depraved to say, as Netanyahu has, that the 'entire people of Gaza are an evil, and that Israel is committed to eradicating this evil from the world?'
The murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington last week has as much to do with Gaza as Israel's massacre of innocents in Gaza. True to the Netanyahu regime's malignant form, the Israeli government is using the two murders to blame Israel's critics for fueling antisemitism and support for Hamas, and to deflect from its crimes against humanity by ceaselessly targeting a people imprisoned by both Hamas and Israel.
There are two objects in Israel's needless war of present and past revenge on Gaza, and neither have anything to do with wiping out Hamas. The first is to destroy all credibility and efficacy of international organizations, humanitarian missions and courts of justice. The hateful Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, confirmed as much last week when he declared: 'We are destroying everything in Gaza, the world isn't stopping us.'
The second is to destroy the human spirit, to make all decent people 'walk around with a feeling of heaviness they cannot shake,' because they 'feel powerless in the face of such egregious injustice.'
The worst conduits of man's Darkness, such as Netanyahu, Trump and Putin, are working to produce 'a loss of trust or faith, not just in governments and institutions, but also in any moral order in the world, and its ability to protect children.'
The intentional darkness in human consciousness rules the world; the question is, how long will it continue? That's not up to governments, but to individuals around the world who can still see and feel.
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