Israel/Palestine

Since many of us don’t see Israel’s part in the cycle of violence, we perceive the other side as unhinged and inhuman. Our delusional sense of superiority festers until it so infects our rational and moral faculties that we become indifferent, or even support, the unimaginable cruelty of Israel’s attack on Gazan civilians.

Nothing could justify bombing Israeli cities until all of us are homeless and destitute, mourning the countless thousands of our dead children, siblings and parents lost in the wreckage. Nothing could justify bombing our hospitals and schools, electric systems and desalination plants, leaving us to die of exposure and disease. Nothing could justify closing our borders until we starve, and then gunning us down when we come to seek aid. Nothing could justify these acts because we are human beings, and even in war these acts constitute grave crimes against humanity. If we could liberate ourselves from our twisted picture of reality and consequent delusions, we would be better able to see the war on Gazan civilians for the barbaric atrocity that it is.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza is a response to Oct. 7, but it must also be understood as part of the state’s ongoing dehumanization and dispossession of Palestinians, which began long before Oct. 7. The current regime of starvation and mass killings is the final and most horrific status forced on Palestinians by the State of Israel. The ocean of blood Israel has spilled in Gaza already floods all of Israel-Palestine, and it may yet drown us all. Our delusion of moral and rational superiority not only leads to moral catastrophe, it is also a dire threat to our survival.