Comments
ACCORDING TO LIZ -
...between Palestinians’ basic necessities and Israel’s need to protect its citizens from Hamas
...between civilian casualties and military deaths
...between spending money on wars that benefit very few and spending money on peace to remove the underlying issues that drive terrorism – lack of food, healthcare, respect, and safety of person
...between decisive action and negotiated resolution
...between refusing to give into the madness, and sinking to the level of evil
...between a relentless bombardment bringing terrorists’ homes down on their children’s small bodies to destroy the enemy within, and compassion
...between the leverage of withholding food, water, electricity, medicine, and fuel from children, the ill and the elderly, and being a legitimate member of the United Nations
...between building a wall to protect the U.S. economic interests and political interference that drive people in South and Central America north, and spending that money on humanitarian services and support instead
...between peace and war, between the living and the dead
...between armaments profiteering and humanitarian aid
...between justified protection of its own borders, and normalizing mayhem by razing an entire territory of two million crammed into a strip just 25 miles long with a width ranging from under four miles to seven and a half, destroying homes, livelihoods and infrastructure; what next? extend the genocide to the West Bank which also has Hamas activists and sympathizes throughout?
...between 1,000 Hamas fighters, and at nearly 4,000 dead and 15,000 injured on both sides – almost all civilians
...between defense development to protect America, and the stoking of forever wars
...between the faces and the horror of those raped and tortured, and those faceless Palestinians murdered in the hospitals and schools, mosques and markets of Gaza
...between the safety of innocent hostages, and urban warfare with Hamas spread among equally innocent civilians and stranded foreign nationals in Gaza
...between the rock facing the Palestinian Authority, the toothless government of the West Bank, of denouncing the Israeli retaliation against civilians in Gaza, and the hard place of facing Hamas retaliation if it calls out the fighters’ killing of Israeli civilians
...between persuasion and punishment; what Biden, in pleading for the country to avoid violence in the wake of January 6, called for: disagreement, not disunion
...between derailing the normalization of Saudi-Israeli diplomatic ties, and the uniting of Israel behind Netanyahu
...between releasing $6 billion in sequestered Iranian oil assets for humanitarian aid in that country for their suffering civilians, and allegations that Iran's security officials "helped plot" Hamas' attack on Israel – echoing the ploy the Bush government used to invade Iraq
...between the right of Rashida Tlaib to condemn Israeli war crimes in Palestine, and a censure motion from an AIPAC-funded congressman calling her anti-Semitic and a Hamas sympathizer
...between right of Senator Lindsay Graham to urge Israel to level Gaza on national news, and the right of a human rights organization to call on the International Criminal Court to pursue this as inciting genocide
...between the right of a free press, and viral social media titillation – an increasingly common ploy by terrorists on websites with minimal content moderation where murder videos justifying demands for redress of injustice only exacerbates the violence
...between demanding clemency for its own civilians abducted, tortured and murdered by a terrorist government largely created by Israeli abuses and its ongoing wanton murders of civilians in Gaza and (to a lesser extent) on the West Bank, and the cutting off of food and power and water, of the ability to excavate the injured from under bombed buildings and care for the ill and injured in medical facilities, to permit people to safely congregate to pray for the dead and missing, to care for children and the elderly
...between fighting a war on terrorists who use Israeli citizens as tools to their ends, and Israelis murdering Palestinian civilians to get to them
...between issuing an ultimatum that a million people who live a precarious existence at the best of times evacuate a territory including its largest city and hospital and move into the already overcrowded south when the border with Egypt has been closed, and the roads to get there are being bombed – will this be a forced march into the Mediterranean?
...between the United States government deploying military assets for Israel to use in its assault on Gaza, and the demand from the American human rights group, Jewish Voice for Peace, to finally address the root cause of the violence: 75 years of Israeli military occupation and apartheid, and the continuing complicity of the United States in this systemic oppression
...between Israel’s famous concerns about the working conditions of donkeys in Gaza used because of the Israeli embargo, and its total disregard of the lives of the people it has oppressed for decades and now appears determined to exterminate
...between a small group of extremists in power or beholden to them in Israel not doing enough to make peace and provoking retaliation by expanding illegal settlements and daring Palestinians to rise up against military oppression, and the desperation of the oppressed willing to risk anything, everything, some for survival others for glory
...between the rhetoric of war, and those who try to ignore the human suffering because it’s jusr too painful to acknowledge
...between pitched battles between protesters on the campuses of American colleges, and supporters at American airports cheering soldiers, reservists and volunteers heading off to protect Israel
...between sanity and common sense, and the escalation of a sense of aggression and retribution, not of justice but of vengeance
We need to move away from the Old Testament patriarchal and vindictive god and go back to embracing the values of justice and peace for which every country and every religion should stand.
The overarching narratives of the Jews and Palestinians are the Holocaust and the Nakba: for Jews, Israel must exist; for Palestinians, the occupation of their land since 1948 must end.
Its roots are far earlier – in the 1917 Balfour Declaration when Great Britain announced its commitment to the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. And further back to multiple diasporas – from the Babylonian Exile of 586 B.C. when some of their ancestors became the first of many waves driven from their homeland followed, over the centuries by others both Jewish and Arab, fleeing the Crusades and the endless wars of conquest and occupation at the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Are the Jews and Palestinians so different a people or culture? Don’t they share far more similarities than differences? Can either trust their own governments to do the right thing? Will there ever be a moral resolution?
Mira Sucharov, a professor at Ottawa’s Carlton University in Canada, puts it this way:
“There should be one value – and one value only – guiding our statements and actions. And that should be the upholding of human life and human dignity. Which means that civilians shouldn’t be attacked, and that the occupation must end and refugee rights must be upheld. They go together.
“Hamas violated that value, and the occupation violates that value.”
And when did two wrongs ever make a right?
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
