Gaza’s Afflictions (a Proem)

May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain. (Oath of Maimonides)

Empathy will never be exhausted as gaza schools and hospitals
are torn asunder by pilots in fighter jets, their grievances

transposed from another time and place into strafing refugee
villages with clinical precision;

All good gained from sufferings of times long past,
all dissipated by the voracious bombing of innocents as tens of

thousands of women and children are slain with impunity i
n a violence that rains down upon terrified heads;

A puzzled drone operator in Gaza asked “when will the
Israeli public wake up to the conflagration that has been taking place

in their name while turning Gaza into rubble…what is it
with these kippah-wearing part-time soldiers with their comments:

“Nova was their Nakba” I see children crawling out from
under rubble looking for remnants and yet we keep bombing;

Israeli strike kills grandfather of ‘soul of my soul’ his grand-daughter Reem having been killed by an earlier air strike…Ten more killed in one family in Gaza airstrikes on Dec 17; “Israeli strike In Deir al-Balah in the central Strip killed 10 people, including the city’s mayor, Diab Al-Jaru (Haaretz)

Palestinians have had a millennium of agriculture and olive groves
and goat herds with multiple generations of shared

Values, but eighty years ago dispossession of six million acres
took place with 700,000 forced into becoming refugees; The

vacuously cruel insistence that Gazans are human animals,
such phrases resonated among a leadership destitute of

empathy for what was being perpetrated, an inversion of reality
allowing victimizers to victimize the unprotected while ignoring

the bestial state of mind that justifies the lethality of bombing,
smothering truth with unfeeling biblical hair-splitting ;

According the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, and The Cambridge World History of Genocide, colonial policies included the deliberate genocide of indigenous peoples in North America…Genocide intent includes spreading of disease via the ‘reduction’ of [natives] to densely crowded and unhygienic settlements…population removals to barren ‘reservations…deliberate starvation and famine, exacerbated by destruction and occupation of the native land base and food resources…”Economics should never be above moral issues and human rights issues” (Eitay Mack, Israeli lawyer & activist))

but soon a time comes when they are unable to relieve themselves
of guilt and shame nor can they continue to

manufacture counterfeit glee, excusing themselves from the barbarism
of murdering children; thus do the

perpetrators of afflictions extend their excuses into the
moral complexities of trauma, while split-personalities are

rife with vengeful zealotry, a moral decay that cannot be atoned
for multiple generations; This holocaust we are

witnessing puts to rest “never again” by leaders who project
evils upon their adversaries, while their own annihilating

contentiousness is blindingly obvious to the discerning; Will they have recourse to the wailing wall to absolve themselves,

or will they continue to resort to biblical self-praising
while conflating 45,000 massacred civilians, including 16,000

children with 1500 Israelis killed or taken hostage; War crimes become genocide when demonizing permits normalizing the

daily erasure of a people by punishing them with gross afflictions; Yet zealots possess a moral schizophrenia

and an ethical decay that will infuse generations, even though genetically entwined and historically linked:

I’ll tell you what should have been done already yesterday, and many months ago: to shout out for a cease-fire, not only to obtain a hostage deal… but also to protect the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank… We need to protect the Palestinians in the name of a shared future….. Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm

America’s leaders have wrought upon their children’s heads a blame
that cannot be erased with well-groomed words;

Essential thinking is necessary to awaken to conciliation and healing;
Did not the Sermon on the Mount preach

selflessness and love reflecting Hillel’s golden rule that
“what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow [man];

that is the whole torah”; One hundred peace groups
in Israel acknowledge the golden rule but only one member in a recent

session of the Knesset supported the genocide case against Israel,
and he was suspended, indicating that some minds

can be elevated above the cruel thoughtlessness of militant leaders;
Did not Freud say that Yahweh is one-half volcano god?

Was not Christ born a Hebrew in Palestine? Are we not all
haunted by the Law of Unintended Consequences?

“It’s like a Ponzi Scheme that collapses when you stop making a profit. Netanyahu is a believer in magical thinking. He supports a war against Iran, but such a war would be a disaster for Israel. These leaders around him are resorting to biblical thinking., no longer acting rationally…Its an eschatological end-times thinking which they want to believe.(Alistair Crooke)

Consequences take place in the deep recesses of consciousness,
where the majority, in their indifference, gnaw

upon a mountain of platitudes: tectonic plates move slowly
but when they erupt in volcanic action the sudden conflagration

can change the nature of the world, killing not only the innocent
but also the guilty in the holy land; The scales of justice are

finely balanced between vice and virtue but out of the traumas
is a reckoning; The deadly weapons of mass destruction

have resulted in the intense trauma suffered by civilians while
ten thousand children’s limbs are torn apart by lethal weapons

to float in ghostly parables and nightmarish dreams as the rabbinic
zealots of upside-down thinking confront truth-telling;

The redoubtable Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro noted: “Zionism is poison
for the Jews; it is a suicidal ideology, and a liability”; it does not

represent Judaism, it is mythological nationalism; Israel is no longer
a safe place but a foreign country,not the promised land”.

Israel is deeply divided, it is on the brink of an institutional collapse as the law …a wall between the kingdom of Judah and Israel all over again…Radical rabbis rely on oral Talmud that they maintain is the true Talmud….the clash is profound….all based on magical thinking…Armageddon with Iran means to attack the head of the octopus, while in Gaza the aim is ethnic cleansing so as to plant 50 settlements.(Alaisdair Crooke)

No matter if the “greater good” is called upon to justify horrors, t
here is nothing holy in massacring humans,

since holiness is a quality to strive for, not a volcano to feed;
Ignoring finely balanced scales of justice brings calamities so

that when the golden rule is so blatantly flaunted it will inevitably
result in a reckoning for gross misdeeds and vast

atrocities; The pain and suffering and the taking of land rightly
belonging to others shouts out for profound remorse and infinite atonement.

Hugh Curran is a lecturer in Peace & Reconciliation Studies at the University of Maine.