Refusing the Normalization of Injustice

Address for the Memorial Day Alternative Peace Observance, May 26

We gather on this Memorial Day to remember all the victims of war. By “all the victims of war”, we mean the combatants and the innocent civilian victims. We mean the lives of our compatriots, the lives of nations in alliance with us, the lives of those we labeled at the time as “enemy” nations. We mean those lost on the battlefield, and those lost in the battle that continues long after the guns fall silent. We remember also the lives of our relatives in the animal kingdom, and the ecological destruction of habitats, soils, rivers, lakes, and streams. We gather to enact our solemn responsibility to remember all these losses, and to rededicate ourselves to abolishing war. And I might add, not only to stop war itself, but as George Fox, founder of Quakerism, urged several centuries ago, to “live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars,” which is to say that if we are serious about abolishing war, we must go to the root of war - to the lusts, fears, and lies that lurk in the human heart and harden as ideologies in society.

When I think of contemporary examples of courageous witnesses who are striving to “live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars”, I think of many of you in this room, and am endlessly grateful for you. I also think of the intrepid reporter Amira Hass, one of the few remaining members of the Israeli Left. She was recently in New York to receive an award for her journalism. She was asked what she saw as the purpose of her work. She said, “I have refused to accept the normalization of injustice.” Her words stayed with me. I offer them today as a call to action for all of us.

For over 575 days, the vast military and political power of Israel, fully backed by a constant supply of bombs and political cover from the United States, has carried out a brutal campaign of collective punishment to make Gaza unlivable and to break the spirit of the Palestinian people through starvation, disease, and genocidal violence. Amira Hass’ statement reminds us that the most dangerous thing about injustice is its normalization. The “powers and principalities” want to make injustice a common occurrence. Something that doesn’t require justification. Just what they do because they have the power and it’s what they want to do. They want us to get used to it, to muffle our screams, to succumb to codes of silence, to go along with genocide. They want us to believe that nothing can be done to stop it…that resistance is futile. But when we remember all the victims of war and genocide, when we raise their voices and refuse to submit to this madness, we are doing three beautiful and extremely important things:

• we are cleaving to the truth and rejecting the propaganda the powers and principalities use to try to deceive and disempower us;

• we are announcing again and again the world we intend - a world of wisdom and compassion, freedom, peace, and justice for all, and

• we are defending and upholding each other in our particular work to make that world a reality.

Today, by our songs and declarations, our speakers’ presentations, our poems and resolutions, and the sounds of the trumpet, we are reclaiming our power. We are showing our faith in the truth, our passion for the world we intend, and our shared commitment to nourish each other in this sacred work of counting the costs of war and working for peace.

Featured Address

This past week, at an Alternative Memorial Day Observance in Chapel Hill, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a NC surgeon who has volunteered on medical missions in Gaza, gave a riveting talk. An excerpt appears below, in which he draws a haunting parallel between photos his father showed him of Holocaust victims in the 1940s and Palestinian victims in Gaza today.

"Throughout my youth, my father shared with me his experiences as a Jewish doctor at the end of World War 2, caring for imprisoned Jews in Nazi concentration and death camps. He shared with me his incredibly disturbing photographs taken within the camps depicting just how horrible humans could be, and what happens when good people make bad decisions and fall on the wrong side of history, destroying the whole population of innocents. He showed me shoeboxes filled with horrid photographs of construction equipment dumping hundreds of emaciated bodies into deep ditches that were so long that they blurred into the distance resembling 6 foot deep furrows in a newly plowed field burying thousands of starved men, women, and children into unmarked mass graves…. The only purpose being to wipe their heritage and their memory from the face of the Earth forever.

I thought I would never personally see such carnage in my life… believing that the organized collections of nations, the growth of democracies and the maturation of world courts would prevent the future destruction of a people just because they are easily exploited. So what has been happening over the last eight decades in Palestine, a land where Jews and Arabs once counted themselves as loving neighbors to cause such animosity? Both Jew and Muslim alike fell victim to the millions of lies which are the foundation of the Zionist political agenda, trying to make the world believe that Palestine is filled only with Muslim terrorists whose only goal in life is to kill every otherwise innocent Jew.

Believing these lies, Western governments have not only permitted the indiscriminate mass murder of innocent civilians, but we have been 100% complicit in enabling them to do so by providing billions of dollars of direct military support to first incarcerate Palestinians for greater than 50 years into an open air prison called the Gaza Strip, and then now systematically cleansing that prison of the trapped Palestinians using the equivalent of three atomic bombs and deliberate starvation as weapons.

I have worked in all of the last three functional hospitals in Gaza and the blood that covered my shoes in both their operating rooms and the emergency departments is on the hands of every American legislature, legacy media journalist, and every single taxpayer who does not stand up against this mass Pediatric homicide! Our silence is the largest bullet in the gun of complicity.!!Not only does the United States supply the weaponry, but we actively block all attempts of other nations to enforce international laws protecting the Palestinians.

20 minutes after Israel’s breaking of the internationally brokered cease-fire at 2:30 in the morning, I had seen dozens of starving toddlers and babies covering every available inch of the emergency room floors overflowing into the hallways, some of who reached up grabbing my pant leg with their only remaining extremity for my help with their shredded bodies. But I stepped over many of them watching them rapidly bleed to death so that I could get to a child that had some chance of survival. I took bullets and shrapnel the size of my thumb out of five-year-olds, I amputated children’s extremities without anesthesia because there was none, and I fixed fractures in toddlers only with drill bits because all the hardware typically used by an orthopedic surgeon was exhausted.

When the sun came up, I smelled the horrid symphony of putrid sulfur, an olfactory blending of months of overflowing raw sewage, decaying corpses, necrotic wounds, and gunpowder.

That same week I treated United Nations relief volunteers, with their legs blown off deliberately attacked by the IDF while in their safe house. I had taken the testimony of dozens of Palestinian surgeons and nurses who had been kidnapped out of the operating rooms to Israeli prisons and tortured for months, and I have walked into the bottom of excavated mass graves on the hospital property where local inhabitants have testified to me their witnessing children being being pushed into that mass grave by a bulldozer, and then having their screams disappear under the falling bucket of dirt as they were buried alive. I have witnessed the intentional use of famine as a weapon of war with most of my patients looking perfectly identical to emaciated Jews in my father‘s sepia photographs.

I have seen two assassinated 6 and 8 year-old boys EACH shot in BOTH their head and chest…. and the assassin‘s perfectly placed second bullet cannot be claimed to be accidental. Indeed, the father of one child looked up towards the source of the gunfire while kneeling over his son’s eviscerated chest and witnessed the Israeli soldier giving the cultural equivalent of his middle finger to him."