schoolyard on fire
I just don't know what to say, but, crying over it tonight, I decided it was sinful not to say something.
That's part of the trouble--I always bought into just enough of the propaganda that I could shake my head and say, well, it's just so sad. It's just a shame. If only the cycle of violence could stop. If only they'd put down those weapons. Hey, you kids, you two, knock it off.
The stories I listened to only worked if I put away the numbers, put away the proportions. And now, I just...what do you say? What do you say to this?
Nothing is not an option, when it comes to the carnage and massacre in Gaza right now.
I just want to say, to all the people demonizing Palestinians right now, saying that this was all a sinister plan to get a bunch of their children killed to make Israel look bad, that this would all just stop if they'd put down the rocks and handmade mortars and listen to reason, they're all terrorists anyhow, they'll push every Jew into the sea--how? How? What is all this "self-defense" defending against?
How could they manage? Gazans live in an open-air prison. They are literally walled-in to one of the most densely populated places in the world. Walled in. No food coming in, no medicine, no fuel, unless they break an unjust law. No leaving, not without humiliation, harassment, assault, and death. There is nobody in there who hasn't lost someone. How many of those women have not been raped? How many of those children have parents? How many Gazans had a meal this week?
They are mostly fighting with old rifles, handmade short-range explosives, rocks and slings, against one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. Don't put that fact aside. Are people in Gaza committing acts of violence that have killed innocent people? Yes. They're hurling a handful of rickety rockets over the wall. In response, they're up against fighter jets, tanks, a navy, and a well-outfitted corps of the best-trained soldiers in the world, well-fed and sharp and with access to nuclear weapons. And this military they're fighting already has them walled in and starving, their neighborhoods smoking rubble, too many of them missing limbs. Tell me this is just an eye for an eye, what a shame. It's not an eye for an eye. It's a fingernail for a torso, at best. Tell me which Gazans have fighter jets. Tell me who in Hamas, even, has a nuclear-capable military unit that could wipe out their enemy at the press of a button. Show me one Palestinian tank.
Knock it off, you kids. Just put down the weapons, no, I don't care who started it. Ahmad, put down your slingshot. Avi, put down your F-15. You're both equally responsible here.
What the hell is this? How are we saying these things? An eye for an eye? In the last eight years, 15 Israelis killed by Hamas in Gaza--real people who mattered. In the last eight years, five thousand Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. Real people who mattered. This is not an eye for an eye. This is nothing resembling an eye for an eye.
But, you keep saying, those Gazans are harboring Hamas, hiding terrorists among them! Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a million people who are not allowed to leave and have nowhere to run. And they deserve death if their apartment--if they still have one--is within shrapnel range of some guy who works for Hamas or his office or the school he went to? If their neighborhood mosque has a couple members who own a gun? If they have the audacity to be on the street trying to feed their families? They're not harboring anyone. They're pressed up against them in prison.
But, but, they voted for Hamas. Tell me what you would do! Tell me! Who do you believe, who do you listen to, who do you rely on? You are walled into a prison with guns pointed at you all the time. Food is not allowed in, fuel is not allowed in, medical supplies are not allowed in. You lose count of family members violently dead or maimed. Your schools and hospitals and places of worship are destroyed, your neighborhood is full of rubble with few buildings intact, and you cannot expect to live to thirty. And you don't know any of the people on the other side of that wall.
Who do you listen to as a reliable source? The guys with the guns pointed at you, who took the food away and tell you you deserve to have nothing, but who the outside world tells you are decent folks acting justly? Or the people you're told are evil scumbags, but who provide you food, medicine, a little pride, a little order, and the promise to fight for you? Who among you, looking at your hungry, sick child, is going to listen to the person telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to care for them over the person handing you bread and antibiotics and a little civil infrastructure? Do you listen to the asshole who gives you food, or the asshole who takes it away? When you have nothing, no dignity, no hope, when you've got nothing to lose, who do you listen to? What do you think you would do differently? Do you honestly think that, with a gun pointed at your family, you wouldn't be grateful for even a vile human being who tells you you don't deserve it and points a weapon right back?
I don't think I'm that saint. I don't think you're that saint. You want to say you'd know better?
How? Who's in charge? Because in the last three days, in the name of exterminating Hamas, Israeli military bombardments have destroyed the university and the tunnels for getting food and medicine and fuel, have destroyed mosques, and have obliterated the police station. After all, if the people voted for Hamas, then any infrastructure that allows them any order or human dignity is technically a Hamas target, right? Those civilians, by having universities, police stations, and post offices, are harboring terrorists. Those people trying to smuggle in heating oil and grain are terrorists. Hell, who doesn't count as a military target? Especially when your own society conscripts every citizen into the military, and the only civilians are the ones not serving right now?
What do you expect? What do you expect them to do? You take away education, government, hospitals, civil police, anyone who can provide information or order but the gang you're supposedly trying to weaken. You take away food and water and electricity and bandages and set their homes on fire, because setting a crowd on fire to get one criminal or ten is something any reasonable person would do. You wall people in, deny them any basic order beyond your tanks, cut them off and take away any hope of a future, any way to invest themselves in building something different, the basic elements of survival--and you expect them to greet you as the reasonable person here? You expect them not to fight back, ever? You make them live like animals, and you expect them to sit down and talk about it over tea? This is not just a surgical strike on Hamas government and military installations, not packed in like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population for voting in a way that, frankly, was hardly optional. It's teaching them a lesson, with explosions. What do you expect those people to do?
Wouldn't you fight back? If it was you? Your family? Your surgically-struck future? Your bombed-out hopes? Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you look at the deaths of 5000 against the deaths of 15 and justify some things that, on a good day in a decent place where life made sense, you would never consider? Because in the last three days they just lost four hundred more, and these were not just military targets. Without medical aid, most of those 1500-so-far wounded will die, too. What would you do? How can you just say, well, it's so sad, but if only they'd stop with those rockets. If only they'd stop fighting back and respect this situation. Everyone's lost someone over there, Israeli and Palestinian alike, but how superhuman do you expect these human beings to be? How can you pretend that nobody has a breaking point, and nobody makes ugly choices when they have nothing, and the person who enforces their having nothing is right in front of them? It's not polite. It's not pretty. And if it was my family, you are goddamn right that little old violence-hating people-loving me would have a gun in her hands, too, or at least a goddamn slingshot.
How superhuman do you expect them to be? is one question. The other is, to believe these things about these people--that this bombardment was all part of a sinister Hamas plot to sacrifice lives to make Israel look bad, that Palestinians are turning out the lights and inducing their children to cry on camera and faking injuries to pretend to the outside world that they're suffering--how subhuman do you believe these people are? How far do you have to go to believe that these people are so alien to you, all sociopathic monsters, to believe these things? That they asked for it?
Why? Because they voted for bad guys? Do Americans deserve to be walled into open-air prisons and have everything taken away, ground into the rubble and broken glass and starving because too many of us voted for George W. Bush and we put genocidal jackass Andrew Jackson on our money? French people? Plenty of them voted for Le Pen, and he's a brownshirt-wearing fascist. Italians? Berlusconi and his Roma purges were hardly a bright spot. What makes you different?
Now take away the options and stop making Palestinians so alien. What would you do? If it were Atlanta walled in and crushed like this? San Francisco? Cincinnati? Manhattan? Would you care that the people bombing your police stations and highrises and shopping centers were doing it because your elected leader killed some people? When do you draw the line? When they blow up the fire department? The tunnel where you sneak in food? Would you decide that you shouldn't fight back, with the tanks at your doorstep and the bombers overhead?
Hey, you two, knock it off. You kids knock it off. It's just so sad, it's just a shame. Ahmad, put down your slingshot and your hand grenade. Avi, put down your gunboat and your nuclear-armed fighter-bomber. An eye for an eye, is what it is. It's just self-defense.
This is being done in my name, by a state that says that anyone who questions its actions is an anti-Semite--that anyone who finds their state actions unacceptable is threatening me. It's funded with the taxes I pay to my own government, on the other side of the world. This is being done to the families of people I love. When it was my ancestors, fighting back and sometimes doing awful things in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Masada, it wasn't "terrorism," it was self-preservation. I just celebrated a holiday commemorating an outnumbered, outgunned guerrilla war against an overwhelmingly-better-armed occupier who said, hey, look, don't mind our elephants, just put your slingshot down and we'll stop setting everything on fire. We don't call Judah Maccabee a terrorist, either, but what's the difference? Tell me the difference. Because this is genocide. This is genocide in my name, in the name of a people who have always considered ourselves underdogs and who, in this one place and time, suddenly have the overwhelmingly upper hand. How have we not learned better? How does our history of suffering and extermination justify committing these crimes? How are we not the first to step up and stand against this?
I still don't know what to say. But it's unacceptable to say nothing.
To my Palestinian brothers and sisters, I am so sorry. I can never, ever be sorry enough, and my crying for your people doesn't make it better, and I'm this American girl who went to Torah school once, with a roof over her head and a full pantry, and I don't know what to say or do but to stand with you in saying this is unacceptable, and in naming it genocide.
Saying nothing is unacceptable.
That's part of the trouble--I always bought into just enough of the propaganda that I could shake my head and say, well, it's just so sad. It's just a shame. If only the cycle of violence could stop. If only they'd put down those weapons. Hey, you kids, you two, knock it off.
The stories I listened to only worked if I put away the numbers, put away the proportions. And now, I just...what do you say? What do you say to this?
Nothing is not an option, when it comes to the carnage and massacre in Gaza right now.
I just want to say, to all the people demonizing Palestinians right now, saying that this was all a sinister plan to get a bunch of their children killed to make Israel look bad, that this would all just stop if they'd put down the rocks and handmade mortars and listen to reason, they're all terrorists anyhow, they'll push every Jew into the sea--how? How? What is all this "self-defense" defending against?
How could they manage? Gazans live in an open-air prison. They are literally walled-in to one of the most densely populated places in the world. Walled in. No food coming in, no medicine, no fuel, unless they break an unjust law. No leaving, not without humiliation, harassment, assault, and death. There is nobody in there who hasn't lost someone. How many of those women have not been raped? How many of those children have parents? How many Gazans had a meal this week?
They are mostly fighting with old rifles, handmade short-range explosives, rocks and slings, against one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. Don't put that fact aside. Are people in Gaza committing acts of violence that have killed innocent people? Yes. They're hurling a handful of rickety rockets over the wall. In response, they're up against fighter jets, tanks, a navy, and a well-outfitted corps of the best-trained soldiers in the world, well-fed and sharp and with access to nuclear weapons. And this military they're fighting already has them walled in and starving, their neighborhoods smoking rubble, too many of them missing limbs. Tell me this is just an eye for an eye, what a shame. It's not an eye for an eye. It's a fingernail for a torso, at best. Tell me which Gazans have fighter jets. Tell me who in Hamas, even, has a nuclear-capable military unit that could wipe out their enemy at the press of a button. Show me one Palestinian tank.
Knock it off, you kids. Just put down the weapons, no, I don't care who started it. Ahmad, put down your slingshot. Avi, put down your F-15. You're both equally responsible here.
What the hell is this? How are we saying these things? An eye for an eye? In the last eight years, 15 Israelis killed by Hamas in Gaza--real people who mattered. In the last eight years, five thousand Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. Real people who mattered. This is not an eye for an eye. This is nothing resembling an eye for an eye.
But, you keep saying, those Gazans are harboring Hamas, hiding terrorists among them! Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a million people who are not allowed to leave and have nowhere to run. And they deserve death if their apartment--if they still have one--is within shrapnel range of some guy who works for Hamas or his office or the school he went to? If their neighborhood mosque has a couple members who own a gun? If they have the audacity to be on the street trying to feed their families? They're not harboring anyone. They're pressed up against them in prison.
But, but, they voted for Hamas. Tell me what you would do! Tell me! Who do you believe, who do you listen to, who do you rely on? You are walled into a prison with guns pointed at you all the time. Food is not allowed in, fuel is not allowed in, medical supplies are not allowed in. You lose count of family members violently dead or maimed. Your schools and hospitals and places of worship are destroyed, your neighborhood is full of rubble with few buildings intact, and you cannot expect to live to thirty. And you don't know any of the people on the other side of that wall.
Who do you listen to as a reliable source? The guys with the guns pointed at you, who took the food away and tell you you deserve to have nothing, but who the outside world tells you are decent folks acting justly? Or the people you're told are evil scumbags, but who provide you food, medicine, a little pride, a little order, and the promise to fight for you? Who among you, looking at your hungry, sick child, is going to listen to the person telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to care for them over the person handing you bread and antibiotics and a little civil infrastructure? Do you listen to the asshole who gives you food, or the asshole who takes it away? When you have nothing, no dignity, no hope, when you've got nothing to lose, who do you listen to? What do you think you would do differently? Do you honestly think that, with a gun pointed at your family, you wouldn't be grateful for even a vile human being who tells you you don't deserve it and points a weapon right back?
I don't think I'm that saint. I don't think you're that saint. You want to say you'd know better?
How? Who's in charge? Because in the last three days, in the name of exterminating Hamas, Israeli military bombardments have destroyed the university and the tunnels for getting food and medicine and fuel, have destroyed mosques, and have obliterated the police station. After all, if the people voted for Hamas, then any infrastructure that allows them any order or human dignity is technically a Hamas target, right? Those civilians, by having universities, police stations, and post offices, are harboring terrorists. Those people trying to smuggle in heating oil and grain are terrorists. Hell, who doesn't count as a military target? Especially when your own society conscripts every citizen into the military, and the only civilians are the ones not serving right now?
What do you expect? What do you expect them to do? You take away education, government, hospitals, civil police, anyone who can provide information or order but the gang you're supposedly trying to weaken. You take away food and water and electricity and bandages and set their homes on fire, because setting a crowd on fire to get one criminal or ten is something any reasonable person would do. You wall people in, deny them any basic order beyond your tanks, cut them off and take away any hope of a future, any way to invest themselves in building something different, the basic elements of survival--and you expect them to greet you as the reasonable person here? You expect them not to fight back, ever? You make them live like animals, and you expect them to sit down and talk about it over tea? This is not just a surgical strike on Hamas government and military installations, not packed in like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population for voting in a way that, frankly, was hardly optional. It's teaching them a lesson, with explosions. What do you expect those people to do?
Wouldn't you fight back? If it was you? Your family? Your surgically-struck future? Your bombed-out hopes? Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you look at the deaths of 5000 against the deaths of 15 and justify some things that, on a good day in a decent place where life made sense, you would never consider? Because in the last three days they just lost four hundred more, and these were not just military targets. Without medical aid, most of those 1500-so-far wounded will die, too. What would you do? How can you just say, well, it's so sad, but if only they'd stop with those rockets. If only they'd stop fighting back and respect this situation. Everyone's lost someone over there, Israeli and Palestinian alike, but how superhuman do you expect these human beings to be? How can you pretend that nobody has a breaking point, and nobody makes ugly choices when they have nothing, and the person who enforces their having nothing is right in front of them? It's not polite. It's not pretty. And if it was my family, you are goddamn right that little old violence-hating people-loving me would have a gun in her hands, too, or at least a goddamn slingshot.
How superhuman do you expect them to be? is one question. The other is, to believe these things about these people--that this bombardment was all part of a sinister Hamas plot to sacrifice lives to make Israel look bad, that Palestinians are turning out the lights and inducing their children to cry on camera and faking injuries to pretend to the outside world that they're suffering--how subhuman do you believe these people are? How far do you have to go to believe that these people are so alien to you, all sociopathic monsters, to believe these things? That they asked for it?
Why? Because they voted for bad guys? Do Americans deserve to be walled into open-air prisons and have everything taken away, ground into the rubble and broken glass and starving because too many of us voted for George W. Bush and we put genocidal jackass Andrew Jackson on our money? French people? Plenty of them voted for Le Pen, and he's a brownshirt-wearing fascist. Italians? Berlusconi and his Roma purges were hardly a bright spot. What makes you different?
Now take away the options and stop making Palestinians so alien. What would you do? If it were Atlanta walled in and crushed like this? San Francisco? Cincinnati? Manhattan? Would you care that the people bombing your police stations and highrises and shopping centers were doing it because your elected leader killed some people? When do you draw the line? When they blow up the fire department? The tunnel where you sneak in food? Would you decide that you shouldn't fight back, with the tanks at your doorstep and the bombers overhead?
Hey, you two, knock it off. You kids knock it off. It's just so sad, it's just a shame. Ahmad, put down your slingshot and your hand grenade. Avi, put down your gunboat and your nuclear-armed fighter-bomber. An eye for an eye, is what it is. It's just self-defense.
This is being done in my name, by a state that says that anyone who questions its actions is an anti-Semite--that anyone who finds their state actions unacceptable is threatening me. It's funded with the taxes I pay to my own government, on the other side of the world. This is being done to the families of people I love. When it was my ancestors, fighting back and sometimes doing awful things in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Masada, it wasn't "terrorism," it was self-preservation. I just celebrated a holiday commemorating an outnumbered, outgunned guerrilla war against an overwhelmingly-better-armed occupier who said, hey, look, don't mind our elephants, just put your slingshot down and we'll stop setting everything on fire. We don't call Judah Maccabee a terrorist, either, but what's the difference? Tell me the difference. Because this is genocide. This is genocide in my name, in the name of a people who have always considered ourselves underdogs and who, in this one place and time, suddenly have the overwhelmingly upper hand. How have we not learned better? How does our history of suffering and extermination justify committing these crimes? How are we not the first to step up and stand against this?
I still don't know what to say. But it's unacceptable to say nothing.
To my Palestinian brothers and sisters, I am so sorry. I can never, ever be sorry enough, and my crying for your people doesn't make it better, and I'm this American girl who went to Torah school once, with a roof over her head and a full pantry, and I don't know what to say or do but to stand with you in saying this is unacceptable, and in naming it genocide.
Saying nothing is unacceptable.
Labels: postcolonial, race, religion
posted by little light | 11:54 PM
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16 comments
