Why do Americans have such high regard for Israelis yet disdain the people of Palestine? For 75 years the Israeli military has forced Palestinian people from their lands, occupied their homes with new Israeli settlers, or bulldozed the homes for new Israeli-occupied housing developments.
The people of Gaza are mostly Palestinians driven by gunpoint from their homes by Israeli soldiers into the most densely populated tiny strip that now is said by the Wall Street Journal to be pulverized as were the German cities of Dresden and Berlin in 1945. Homes, apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, medical clinics, and markets were left in rubble, and thousands, mostly children, were under the rubble.
Unlike Israel, Gaza has no tanks or armored vehicles, no helicopter gunships, and Reaper drones with Lockheed-Martin Hellfire missiles or American planes and US 155 mm artillery. The attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 was a brutal terror attack after 17 years of barbed wire imprisonment of 2.2 million in an area of 139 square miles. Broome County has 197,000 people in 705 square miles.
Was that attack the reason why the Western world supported the genocide of the people of Palestine? Is it because we of the West, mostly Christians, grieve for Christian crimes committed against Jews historically, especially the Holocaust of the Nazis?
U.S. politicians have been sent to Israel over and over as delegations paid for by AIPAC to observe the fruits of U.S. military aid to Israel. As reported in Intercept on Nov. 23, 2003, “Millions are spent every year ferrying dozens upon dozens of congressional members to Israel for eight-day junkets.” American Israel Public Action Committee is referred to by Wikipedia as having 100,000 members, 17 regional offices, and ‘a vast pool of donors. The torturous treatment of Palestinians is little known by Americans even after 75 years of Israeli terror. Why is that?
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who grew up in a Zionist household, wrote on Jan. 5, 2004 how clever the narrative of persecuted Israel is by noting the way it positions itself ‘as the victim even when it’s doing the killing.’
Most of the world is calling shame on Israel for its genocide in Gaza. South Africa has brought an 84-page indictment of Israel before the International Court of Justice. Code Pink supports the South African indictment, and it can be found by Googling Code Pink’s South African Genocide Charge Tool Kit. The Director of Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, is a Jew.
The director of the oldest United States Peace and Justice organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation,–Ariel Gold–is a Jewish woman from Ithaca and a graduate of Binghamton University. Ariel Gold is in support of the South Africa genocide charge against Israel.
We can’t allow such a horror to occur in our time without acting. Contact your political leaders and ask your church and synagogue leaders to break their silence on the Israeli genocide.
Jack Gilroy, an Endwell resident, is Events Organizer for UpState Pax Christi, and Broome County Veterans for Peace Chapter 90.