It’s Now or Never for Gaza

Two terrible things are converging in Gaza as I write this: a full-scale Israeli military invasion, and widespread famine. 1) Israel is poised to militarily occupy the entire Gaza Strip and impose its will on the people of Gaza (See the article in this week’s newsletter detailing the actions of the Israeli War Cabinet). 2) Since 2007, Israel has created widespread acute malnutrition, starvation, and famine in Gaza (See the article in this week’s newsletter about starvation). The combination of total war and famine will cause skyrocketing death tolls and a humanitarian crisis of unimaginably catastrophic proportions. This is not hyperbole. If these two full-blown assaults on life in Gaza are allowed to happen, it will very likely mean the end of Palestinian life in Gaza.

The United States has the power to stop Israel’s military invasion. It can tell Netanyahu: no more American weapons for genocide; agree to permanent ceasefire with Hamas; exchange prisoners for hostages, lift the blockade immediately, open the border crossings, allow at least 600 trucks a day into Gaza for as long as aid is needed. These critical interventions should have and could have been undertaken months ago. The failure to avert this disaster is directly attributable to bipartisan political elites in Washington having been bought by the Israel Lobby and the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex. A majority of these corrupt Washington insiders are utterly incapable of independent thought. Voting to continue empowering Israel to slaughter innocents is monstrous. Their hearts have hardened.

Outside of Washington, there are signs in recent weeks that we may be reaching a tipping point. We can only hope it’s not too late. Omer Bartov, an Israeli Jew, Brown University professor, and one of the world’s leading Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholars, abandoned his reservation about calling it “genocide,” and published an influential article in the New York Times declaring, “I know it when I see it.” Israel’s human rights organization, B’Tselem, and another Israeli group, Physicians for Human Rights, determined conclusively that Israel was committing genocide. They stated, in fact, that Israel was carrying out “the extermination phase” of this genocide. In order to stop it, they called for an international arms embargo to be imposed upon Israel immediately. Multiple Christian ecumenical organizations, including the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, Churches for Middle East Peace, Sabeel, and a range of denominations - Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ, Lutherans, Mennonites, Quakers, Methodists, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church - are on record calling for an arms embargo against Israel. These statements as well as strong polling data from Gallup and Pew favoring the Palestinian cause indicate shifting trendlines and a groundswell of support for Israel until it ceasing the flow of weapons to Israel until it complies with international humanitarian law.

This is all good, but the hour is extremely late and the time to act is NOW. We’ve come to the crossroads. I dearly hope I’m wrong. But, either caring, responsible people act now to stop the genocide, or the invasion and the famine will do their worst, and we might as well be saying, “Let them all die.”