Like many people there are mornings when we are unable to listen to the news taking place in Gaza as it is so deeply distressing that the mind shuts down at the daily bombing and the horrific death count. The only parallel in literary terms might be found in Dante’s “Inferno”, a place where Israel’s leaders and their militaristic enablers will surely reside in the minds of future generations, How can they possibly atone for the slaughter of women and children, while continuing to justify their atrocities with specious arguments.
There are moral consequences to the wholesale destruction taking place. An ancient people are being destroyed and American complicity is clearly evident in the freely-given weaponry. As the well-known journalist, Thomas Friedman, in a NY Times article said: “The Israeli Government is Not our Ally” … “this ultranationalist, messianic Israeli government is not America’s ally. It’s priority is not peace with its neighbors, its priority is the annexation of the West Bank, the expulsion of the Palestinians of Gaza and the re-establishment there of Israeli settlements …”
This war is a one-sided conflict in which Israeli air-power overwhelms the civilian population. What is taking place is a massacre, posing as a war, resulting in the utter destruction of every institution of higher learning and every hospital. Now there is even the denial of food, ostensibly as a weapon of war, to induce mass starvation. Two million Palestinians are compelled to live in Refugee tents and even these are unsafe with the resumption of bombing while the ceasefire has ceased being a ceasefire and the Israeli leadership has become bereft of even a modicum of moral scruples.
The poet W.H. Auden said it well “…those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”. This “evil” is being perpetrated upon an indigenous people in willful ignorance of the generational traumas that the victims are suffering and will continue to suffer. Even the perpetrators will suffer the poison of the “serpent’s bite”, and what the Irish writer James Joyce called the “agenbite of inwit”, the deep gnawing guilt felt by consciences trying to atone for the generations of suffering caused by oppressors. In Exodus, it is said “ye shalt not afflict any widow or fatherless child…and they cry unto me I will surely hear their cry and my wrath shall wax hot…”(Exodus 22). Surely this “wrath [will] wax hot” and the “deep gnawing guilt” will continue to play itself out upon generations yet to be born.
Middle East envoys: “met with a senior Israeli delegation in Qatar to discuss a truce in Gaza,…but Israel has refused to alter its position on cease-fire/hostage deal talks, an Israeli official told Haaretz News.
Netanyahu relies upon the U.S. to give him international protection and rages against even the mildest criticism, such as from “French President Emmanuel Macron who said…Netanyahu’s policy in Gaza was “shameful” and that European countries should increase sanctions.”
On the question of Genocide, seven leading international experts … were interviewed by NRC, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and were unequivocal: Not only have they all come to believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the vast majority of their peers in academia concur. “Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey. “Uğur Ümit Üngör, who works at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, agreed. Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman of Open University of Israel initially “opposed the genocide label” until Netanyahu’s government flouted the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza. … Strong waves of condemnation included an open letter signed by 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, stating that they cannot “turn a blind eye or remain silent at this renewed [onslaught on Gaza]”.
Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites… Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based on cultural and religious, but not on genetic differences.(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11802415_HLA_Genes_in_Palestinians_The_Origin_of_Palestinians_and_Their_Genetic_Relatedness_With_Other_Mediterranean_Populations)
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Hugh Curran teaches in Peace & Reconciliation Studies at the University of Maine
