Memoriana

Graphics above and below are from The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward - Prepared by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, October 7, 2024

For many of us, something has changed in ourselves as a direct result of Israel's conduct of its ongoing "response" to Hamas's surprise breach of the Iron Dome October 7, 2023.  In the aftermath of the attack in which 1200 Israelis were killed and hundreds were taken hostage, as tens of thousands of civilian Palestinian bodies piled up within the open-air prison of Gaza throughout the month; as hospitals, schools, homes and apartment buildings crumbled under the force of 2000 lb bombs leaving 90% of Gazans unhoused within a span of weeks and the onslaught continued with unquestioning, ghoulishly apologetical American support and no end to the carnage in sight,  our world crumbled too.  

I remember back in October feeling very strongly that Israel had broken something it would come to wish it had not broken and that broken thing was the compact that we in the west have had (in so many unwritten words) to grant Israel the exceptional license to take reparations in perpetuity for Hitler's holocaust against Europe's Jews in whatever form it deemed necessary in how it conducted its affairs.  We agreed to grant Israel the right to arbitrate the equivalence of anti-zionism or opposition to Israel with anti-semitism.  We agreed to let Israel run roughshod over propriety and precision in how it characterized its enemies, in its right to perpetual victim status regardless of its culpability -- to grant its special pleading the power to erase its cruelty.  We agreed to look the other way as it constructed a separate and unequal life for the Palestinians it walled away, their access to food, water and supplies as tightly controlled as their freedom of movement within the homeland that Israel now occupied-- we agreed not to call it apartheid.  But it did not take the over 100,000 Gazans, the nearly 700 Palestinians in the West Bank and the growing number of killed civilians in Lebanon and Syria that Israel has slaughtered in the past 12 months , to say nothing of the hundreds of civilian Israelis similarly needlessly killed a year ago as mere collateral damage in their country's wars of choice to put the lie to the tales we let ourselves be told about Israeli virtue.  October voided that.  

As a result of Israel's self-exposure, I no longer believe that Israel's project would be rationalizable but for the unfortunate prevalence of odious conservative elements in its government, but rather that its birth out of European racism, anti-semitism and colonialism-- and especially in light of its conduct in the world to secure its dubious future ever since--should doom it.  The current ethno-state should be succeeded by a single state of egalitarian democratic rule for the current citizens of Israel who wish to remain and for the Palestinians that Israel has displaced.  I no longer accede to the proposition that the right of Israel to exist outweighs the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in whatever peace they can forge together as equal citizens in that land, from the river to the sea.