Israel and Palestine: A Terrible Innocence

We extract a terrible price when we become the architects of our own ignorance.

Amid all the horror, for some reason I can’t stop thinking about a headline in the New York Times the day before Hamas attacked. It said, “Israel’s embargo made donkeys critical to Gaza. Now it may take them away.” As the article explained, more than 15 years of embargo had forced Gazans to use donkey carts “to haul produce, building materials, bomb debris and garbage.” But Israeli animal rights groups objected to the donkeys’ working conditions, so the edict came down.

The message is clear: Gaza’s human beings matter less to its occupiers than the animals some call “beasts of burden.” Animal rights is a noble cause, but what strange inversion of innocence lets animal activists ignore the suffering of their fellow human beings?

“We are fighting human animals,” said Israel’s Defense Minister, but he clearly doesn’t believe it. His government is much kinder to animals. And we now know that a world order which brutalizes human beings can’t be trusted to protect animals either. Hellfire is raining down on the donkeys, as well as the people, of Gaza.

A Tribal Journey

The death count currently stands at 260 for the young attendees of a trance music festival in the Re’im kibbutz. The invitation to that festival promised “a tribal journey, where the essence of unity and love combines forces with the best music, powerful and captivating international content, and breathtaking location...”

It sounds so naive, so hippie-ish, so innocent. I might have gone once myself, many years ago. It brings to mind the Eloi, those gentle people in H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” who gamboled in their gardens until the moment of their violent death. (That’s not an endorsement of Wells’ book, which is a eugenicist diatribe. One lesson to be learned from this violence is that DNA-based tribalism brings nothing but pain.)

Innocence is precious. Grief strikes like lightning when innocence dies so quickly.

Hamas’ massacres were brutal and illegal. They were also a violation of Islamic rules of war, which expressly forbid harming civilians. The sight of fighters shouting “Allahu Akbar” over the naked body of a young woman was a disgrace to their cause and to their faith. But “unprovoked”? Hardly.

“She loved to party,” said the young woman’s cousin. There’s an innocence in that, too. Lots of young people want to enjoy life. There will be time later for the pain.

The Re’im festival’s invitation declared that “the central driving force” behind the global trance community is “a set of fundamental and important human values: Free love and spirit, environmental preservation, (and an) appreciation of rare natural values ...”

How might that have sounded to the people of Gaza, who have none of those things?

There was also a proclamation that the trance culture of freedom was “set to land in our small but vibrant land!” Small, it says, but vibrant.

The English-language name for the festival was “Parallel Universes.”

Across the Borderline

As this map shows, the festival took place a few short miles from Gaza, where:

• A World Health Organization (WHO) study documented 191 Palestinian deaths and more than 10,000 casualties as a result of “occupation-related” violence, including 187 attacks on health care responders.

• A 2022 study found that “human rights violations have contributed to significant deficiencies in health and quality of health care” in Palestine, sometimes with lethal results.

• A 2018 Rand Corporation study found “a dual water crisis” of water contamination and wastewater sanitation. Water contamination leads to increased illness and death from diarrheal diseases (to which children are especially vulnerable). 

• Another WHO report concluded, “In the Gaza Strip from 2019 to 2021, just 55 percent of essential medicines were available in the Central Drugs Store of the Ministry of Health.” 35 percent of permits for hospital visits, often for cancer treatment, were not approved in time.

• Per the local United Nations human rights chief, “Israeli forces have frequently prevented access to medical care, including for first response teams to reach persons with life-threatening injuries.”

• 82.7 percent of Gazan women surveyed “faced difficulties meeting basic needs for themselves and their families.” More than one-third lost family members in Israeli attacks, which injured nearly one-third of them.  

• 70 percent were “unable to access vital medical care due to restrictions on their freedom of movement.”

• More than one-third lost a family member because they were denied permission to access medical treatment that’s unavailable in Gaza.

The Children’s Hour

Unlike their peers elsewhere, innocence is something the young people of Gaza will never know. Youth unemployment is 70 percent. 97 percent of the water they drink is contaminated. More than 23,000 Palestinians were injured during nine months of protest in 2018 alone, while and 6,700 people, most of them young, were shot by the Israeli military.

The loss of innocence starts early. A 2022 survey by Save the Children found that 80 percent of Gaza’s children – 800,000 of them, who have only known life under siege – experience depression, fear, bedwetting, and grief, and/or symptoms. 59 percent have refused to speak and 48 percent have difficulty concentrating. “Many (children) shared vivid memories of the bombings they had experienced,” the charity reports, “recalling how their homes and schools were destroyed, and their loved ones killed.”

The deliberate Israeli policy of denying power, water, and food to Gaza will hit the children hardest. "As Save the Children reports, “Research, including ours, shows that the lack of electricity at night has heightened children’s fears and is one of the reasons they have trouble sleeping.”

In Gaza, midnight is the children’s hour.

Circle of Targets

To anyone who thinks I’m using these statistics to justify the slaughter at Re’im: God forbid. The murder and mistreatment of innocents on one side never justifies the slaughter of innocents on the other. I’m rejecting the logic of Hamas, of Israel – and, now, of Joe Biden. His remarks today were an unequivocal declaration of support for bloodlust and war crimes, without a word of criticism about airstrikes on schools, mosques, and hospitals.

“The Israeli occupation has expanded its circle of targets to the medical teams, the health facilities and ambulances,” said a spokesman for the Gaza health ministry. Not a word about that, either.

The US first declared its support for Israel’s war crimes during the holiday it now calls “Indigenous People’s Day” – a long-overdue acknowledgement – thereby ensuring this ruthless assault on the indigenous people of Palestine.

Architects of Ignorance

Palestinians see it all. They see their cause sold out with a fist bump as the American president swallows his pride for a jigsaw killer’s petrodollars. They see the United States stand idly by as Israeli armed forces murder 20 journalists, including an American citizen killed by an American bullet. They see the erosion of democracy spreading even to its Jewish citizens, under the leadership of a corrupt prime minister who has repeatedly undermined the US president and his party.

Those who refuse to condemn Israel’s war crimes are shrouding themselves in a cocoon of artificial innocence. They’re architects of ignorance; their own, and in the president’s case, other people’s. I was ignorant like that too, once. I was raised to think as they think. The theme song to the pro-Israel propaganda movie “Exodus” was an anthem for a generation of American Jews. “This land is mine,” it said, “God gave this land to me.”

That kind of innocence lights the sky with rocket fire.

A Brutal Innocence

Oh, God. I wish I didn’t have to know any of this – the sudden horror of the massacres, the slow horror of the occupation.  But our innocence, our ignorance, exacts too great a price. We have a moral obligation to end our practice of keeping certain horrors just outside our peripheral vision. Justice demands that we hurt the same way when any civilian suffers, not just those of a certain skin color, religion, or loyalty to a US-allied government.

It’s delusional to imagine that Israel’s actions, or those of the United States, will lead to anything but more tragedy for everyone. Americans would be well advised to remember the words of a former president – one who remains popular today, especially among Democrats. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,” said John F. Kennedy, “make violent revolution inevitable.”