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When you watch the latest TV news on Israel's war in Gaza, it feels as if its military had invaded another country. So, it's important to remind ourselves that the tens of thousands of weapons the Biden administration has been sending to Israel since October 7th, including most recently, as the Washington Post reported, "more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs" -- and keep in mind that those 2,000 pounders are "capable of leveling city blocks and leaving craters in the earth 40 feet across and larger" -- are meant to be used to obliterate a 25-mile-long strip of land, smaller than some large American cities. It's hard to remember a moment when such a relatively tiny area got quite such a pounding, day after day, week after week, month after month.
And keep in mind as well, that not many small areas of land are quite so densely populated (about 14,000 people per square mile), so the toll from those American weapons has been nothing short of devastating. In addition, a 2,000-pound bomb capable of destroying a city block won't make any distinction between a member of Hamas and families with children. Nor, it's now all too clear, has the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing compatriots had the faintest urge to make such a distinction. Otherwise, an estimated 10,000 Gazan children, or one of every 100 kids there, wouldn't be dead and, in all too many cases, buried in the rubble of the buildings in which they lived.
In short, there can be little question that the present war not just in, but on, Gaza, is a crime against humanity (as, of course, was Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel). With that in mind -- and worse yet, no end yet in sight for such a nightmare -- let TomDispatch regular Ellen Cantarow, who long ago wrote about Israel for various American publications, offer a glimpse of hell on earth in the world of 2024. Tom
Dead on Arrival
Israel's Blowback Genocide
Words can't express the horrors of Israel's genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn't exist; seeing building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few, only partially standing hospitals; and witnessing children and other patients sprawled on hospital floors, limbs amputated without anesthesia (Israel having blocked all medical supplies).
It has taken the Jewish state's savagery to break decades of silence about its history of crimes against humanity. U.S. military historian Robert Pape has called the onslaught against Gaza "one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history." Former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour has said that we are witnessing "probably the highest kill rate of any military" since the Rwandan genocide of 1994."
An Unsent Letter
Palestine is finally an international cause. Outrage surges via global demonstrations. Israel has become a pariah in the global South. In the United States, organizations including A Jewish Voice for Peace, Code Pink, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights have been marching against the horrors now underway.
Within this charged atmosphere, the 66th reunion of my 1958 Philadelphia High School for Girls graduating class will take place in June 2024. Girls' High was that city's leading academic public high school of my time, together with its brother school, Central High (attended by Noam Chomsky). It was stellar not only for its academic excellence but for its integration of Black and White students at a time of deep segregation elsewhere. My mother, who graduated from Girls' High in 1924, sent me there because of its policy of racial inclusiveness.
I recently began preparing an open letter to my classmates about the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing settler pogroms of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank -- houses burned, olive trees uprooted, Palestinians made to flee. Ours is the prototypical Zionist generation and I particularly wanted to address my former classmates, some of whom still cling stubbornly to their allegiance to Israel. I was told, however, that there wouldn't be time to read the letter at our reunion which lasts just a few afternoon hours. What follows, then, is based on the letter I was preparing to read then, had the time been available.
Zionism and The Six Day War
In the early 1950s, my best childhood friend collected money to plant trees in Israel. At one point, her synagogue, which sponsored that project, needed "straight pins." Somehow, I heard "shraypins" instead, a mysterious Hebrew word my imagination concocted and that her friends would find funny indeed. Zionism, in other words, was simply foreign to me.
The first time I recall a thrill from it came right after Israel's triumph in the 1967 Six Day War. I was then actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement on my graduate school campus and, on a trip to Paris that year, didn't want to identify as American. I spoke French quite well and not being able to tell from my slight accent that I was an American, someone asked me where I was from. Searching for a nationality I wouldn't be ashamed of, I blurted out that I was an "Israelite."
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