By Oscar H. Blayton
When Joe Biden gave the commencement speech at Morehouse College this year, some students in the audience left while others turned their backs to him in silent protest. While the protests at the ceremony were silent and not disruptive, off campus, protestors marched with banners and called on motorists passing by to honk their horns to show their disapproval of the current U.S. foreign policy regarding the horrific events taking place in Gaza.
There are those in our community who do not see how a decades-long conflict taking place sixty-five hundred miles away is relevant to our lives here in the United States. Given the hardships, deprivations and injustices Black folk suffer in America, many of us believe that we need to tend to our own problems – to the exclusion of everyone else. But there is a truth that is often paid lip service and little more. That truth is “We are our brother’s keepers.” And this truth is not just to be respected in terms of our family or our race or our nation. It is a universal truth that, when observed, makes us all better people.
Human history is a long, sad litany of failing to adhere to this truth. These failures are recounted in the cultural admonitions told in the Biblical story of Caine and Able and the Ancient Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers.” Tragedies, such as the Transatlantic Slave trade, the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are recorded in history books as instances of these failures.
What has been happening in Gaza in response to the October 7th massacre in Israel cannot be described in any other way than genocide. With the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund estimating that more than 13,000 Palestinian children have perished in Gaza due to Israel’s military action during the past seven months, there is no other way to describe what is taking place. But because we are our brother’s keepers, we cannot blindly hate anyone because of who they are. People are to be assessed by what they do, not because of their nationality, or ethnic or religious background.
There are many individuals who identify as Jewish and speak out in opposition to the horror we are all witnessing in Gaza.
Norm Chomsky, one of the most acclaimed critical thinkers of our day has this to say about the current events in Gaza.
“The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel, it is not about achieving peace.
“The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in a decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
“Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army… and calls it a war. It is not a war, it is murder.
“When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense. Call it what you like, it’s not defense.”
Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad have written an essay in which they cite several damning facts about the manner in which the Israeli government is conducting its military action against Gaza. They wrote:
“On October 9, following two days of extensive aerial bombing, the country’s minister of energy and infrastructure, Israel Katz, announced that he had ordered water, electricity, and fuel to be cut off. ‘What was’, he said, ‘will not be.’ … “The same day, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, demanded a ‘complete siege’ of the enclave: ‘there will be no food, there will be no fuel.’”
“These were all declarations of an intent to deprive the Palestinians in Gaza ‘of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies’—the legal definition of ‘using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare’, a crime against international law under the Rome Statute. Israeli newspapers, television, and social media, meanwhile, were saturated with calls to destroy the population, in whole or in part: to ‘erase’ Gaza, ‘flatten’ it, turn it ‘into Dresden.”
Haddad and Gordon went on to write that “Israeli authorities informed the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East ‘they will no longer approve any UNRWA food convoys to the north.’ An action that would certainly result in the death of Palestinians due to starvation.” They also reported that Israeli protestors blocked aid deliveries from entering Gaza and wrote: “With each new development, one can only wonder what more Israel intends to do to annihilate Gaza’s population and render the region’s recovery impossible.”
In response to Neve Gordon’s writing about the facts occurring due to the current Israeli response to the October 7th attack he has been maligned by some Israelis as a “Anti-Israel Israeli Professor.”
It is difficult to understand how a collective group of individuals whose parents and grandparents suffered under the Nazi genocide cannot see the genocidal nature of their military assault on Gaza. Norman Finkelstein, the son of two holocaust survivors, has for decades tried to shine a spotlight on the injustices and hardships the Palestinians have suffered at the hand of the Israeli government and its complicit allies.
It is important to remember history, and in doing so, we should remember that as Europe was unmistakenly headed for a second global war in the 1930s, and after that war erupted as World War II, many nations that are now complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians either denied entry to Jews fleeing the holocaust. And if they did not deny Jews entry outright, they made it extremely difficult for them to seek asylum. Counted among those nations are the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.
The United States State Department and then President Franklin Roosevelt claimed that the U.S. bar to Jewish immigrants was necessary because they could threaten national security.
Norman Finkelstein, reflecting on a lesson he learned from his mother wrote:
“The time is long past to open our hearts to the rest of humanity’s sufferings. This was the main lesson my mother imparted. I never once heard her say: ‘Do not compare.’ My mother always compared. In the face of the sufferings of Africa-Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, my mother’s credo always was: ‘We are all holocaust victims.’”
African Americans in America can learn from Mrs. Finkelstein’s words. Wherever there is suffering, “We are all holocaust victims.’”
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