Let Gaza Live

Remarks from the “Let Gaza Live” Vigil on July 12th- Binkley Baptist Church, Chapel Hill

For 644 days the people of Gaza have endured a genocide. Israel has dropped over 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, the equivalent of 6 Hiroshimas, surpassing all the bombing of WW II. Two million Palestinians have been forcibly expelled from their homes, rendered homeless and displaced time after time with no safe place in Gaza. Israel has made Gaza uninhabitable. Hospitals, schools, universities, the electric grid, water treatment plants, the roads, churches and mosques essentially demolished to rubble. 58,000 known dead, 18,000 of them children, 12,500 women. That’s not counting those buried under the rubble or vaporized. Israel has said recently there are “370,000 fewer Palestinians” in the Gaza Strip. 2100 Palestinian families have been removed from the civil registry, entirely wiped out, eliminated from the collective gene pool. Since late May, over 800 starving Palestinians have been killed and thousands injured by Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries while desperately seeking food at “aid distribution sites.”

I know these statistics can be mind-numbing. So, let me tell you a story of one man’s perspective. It’s the story of Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Rocky Mount orthopedic surgeon, a product of a Jewish-Christian household, who volunteered at the Indonesian Hospital in Khan Younis in central Gaza this past spring. He told us recently that his Jewish father, a physician, was tasked with caring for the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps after WWII. His father kept a shoebox of photographs he took….images of emaciated bodies, mass graves as far as the eye could see. His father’s photographs showed unspeakable inhumanity and cruelty, images Mark said he never expected to see again in his lifetime. Then he went to Gaza. There he saw emaciated bodies, mass graves, death and destruction, catastrophic human suffering on an unimaginable scale. He has been struggling with the agonizing truth: the descendants of the Holocaust who said “Never Again!” are committing genocide against the Palestinians. Those who were starved in Nazi ghettoes are starving Palestinians in ghettoes. Those who survived Nazi concentration camps are building a concentration camp for Palestinians in Rafah.

Like Dr. Perlmutter, we have witnessed unbearable atrocities. But we are not only witnesses. We are accomplices. None of this could have happened without our nation’s blessing and continuous supply of weapons – devastating, civilization-ending weapons. Our tax dollars have made all of it possible. We are deeply complicit in this genocide. Yes, it is happening against our will and over our objections. But no one can deny that nothing we have done has made it stop – not our prayers, not our legislative advocacy, not our direct actions, not our protests, not dozens of rallies and marches.

So, as we stand here today, we have WITNESSED this genocide. We have ENABLED this genocide. We have GRIEVED and MOURNED this genocide. And now, we renew our vows yet again to STOP this genocide. We demand:

• Permanent Ceasefire

• Exchange of hostages and prisoners

• Withdrawal of Israel’s military

• Humanitarian aid and medicine administered by competent, compassionate UN organizations

• No ethnic cleansing

• Arms Embargo

And we haven’t even talked about Accountability for the war crimes, Reconstruction of Gaza, and Reparations. We haven’t even talked about dismantling the evil structures that have spawned and sustained this mass murder campaign – this broken, deeply unrepresentative political system, and the whole “economy of genocide” UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has exposed.

All of that good and necessary work awaits us. But today, I simply want to say thank you for being here today…for deciding to attend this vigil, to raise your voice, to join with others, to be yourself a sign of hope, hope for justice, hope for freedom, hope for peace. The Palestinian people are living through the darkest chapter in their history. Today, by your presence, you are saying that they do not live through it alone, abandoned, unseen, or unheard.

In fact, you are making real what the Apostle Paul taught centuries ago: that whenever any part of the Body suffers, the whole Body suffers with it. And Paul went on to say that whenever any part of the Body rejoices, the whole Body rejoices with it. One day, Palestine will be free. And when the Palestinian people have their freedom, there will be such rejoicing in the heavens and on the earth, and we will be there rejoicing with them.