"Maggots Were Being Picked From The Wounds Of The Injured"
The conditions inside the Gaza Strip have sunk to unfathomable depths.
It seems to be a general rule that the older you are, the more deeply you feel emotional pain. Writing about this lopsided war in Gaza is depressing in ways that I have never felt before. As a young teenager, Bosnia was something that was in the news, that I was aware of, but despite how bad it was, it lacked the sheer scale of destruction that has been visited upon the Gaza Strip. Gaza City is gone, nothing but rubble. Jabalia, a refugee camp turned quasi-city for over 250,000 Palestinians, is also flattened. Khan Younis, further south, a place that Israel told the denizens of Gaza City and Jabalia to flee to a mere month ago, is being systematically destroyed by Israeli artillery and bombing. Rafah, the border crossing town with Egypt, the only location that any aid can pass through, is also being bombed, though its real threat is that of disease, lack of resources, and overcrowding that resembles the worst concentration camps throughout history.
The graphic above does a great job of showing the amount of destruction and the grotesquely pitiful “humanitarian zone.” It does not show the human toll, though, and it really hit home Thursday morning in the Washington Post. The headline of this piece is a sentence in a long article that sought to sum up conditions there. It would not surprise me if mass graves become the result of those conditions. This slow-motion genocide, an inescapable conclusion based upon how the IDF has conducted this war, is now being presented to the Israeli people thanks to Haaretz, Israel’s largest newspaper, which ran a detailed, graphic article on conditions in Gaza. Below are some excerpted paragraphs.
The death toll reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry continues to rise. Israelis don't believe them, but they also don't watch Al-Jazeera or other broadcasts. To chronically watch these reports creates an illusion of closeness and involvement, and arouses a contradictory feeling of complete paralysis in the face of the carnage. Verbal descriptions are a poor substitute.
Here and there, one sees a report of clashes between Hamas fighters and IDF troops. But Hamas' bragging about some Israeli APC being hit or rockets being fired into Gush Dan has nothing to do with the craters in the heart of neighborhoods whose residents were killed and where the facades of the apartment buildings were sheared off…
How many people are crowded into the Rafah District today? How many people does the IDF think it can cram into it? Maybe 1,100,000? Or 1,300,000? At one million, the population density is 15,873 people per square kilometer; if it becomes 1.3 million, it will reach 20,634. "Sardines," someone wrote to an old Israeli friend who lives in Tel Aviv. Sardines without water or food.
Cholera will begin to spread. Dysentery is a distinct possibility. Starvation deaths. Surgeries are performed without anesthesia, something not seen at scale since the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. That headline, that quote about maggots, is something that makes me physically ill every time I think of it or read the sentence again. If the IDF’s goal is to make Israel safe, turning two million Palestinians irrevocably against you is a poor way to achieve that milestone. If the goal, though, is to murder or drive out of the Holy Land any Palestinian that is there, then it is much more successful.
Consider how Israel is “notifying” Palestinian civilians of evacuation routes: they’re posting convoluted, hard to understand maps on social media in a place without power to recharge phones or cell towers functioning for more than a few hours at a time. They also drop leaflets, but think about how realistic that way of notice is when areas are being bombed relentlessly. In short, the IDF’s notices are nonexistent when viewed through the lens of someone on the ground in Gaza, and it is hard to find any other conclusion that does not end with genocide being the goal. Quite simply, I refuse to believe the IDF is that incompetent that it would simply stumble into a genocide. Its history, unfortunately, includes Sabra and Shatila, and when I hear “most moral military” spoken, I want to shout those names over and over. And, lest anyone think that I’m some closet anti-Semite, I would point out that America, Britain, France, China, Russia, and virtually every other large military force has blatant war crimes in its past, with the common factor being that the victims are brown or black-skinned. The IDF has simply learned from past colonial powers, and yes, America has been and still is one of those.1
Yesterday, after Article 99 was invoked, the US vetoed the Security Council resolution to enforce a ceasefire. This country is now inextricably tied to the IDF’s actions because we refused to stop them. Our government, and that of Israel, can only escape the death toll for so long in Gaza. Eventually, the truth will come out. If Never Again only applies to Jews, and the hell with anyone else, how is that any different than any other racial superiority movement that slaughters those it considers inferior? Both nations need to consider the long term consequences of not creating and sustaining a true aid mission. We should be boots on the ground, with food and water and fuel, creating larger zones of safety. By standing aside, and using our veto to cover for what is happening, we become fully complicit in the grisly aftermath.
Maggots in the wounds of civilian victims. Population densities akin to that of factory farmed animals. Epidemics ready to break out everywhere, and an ungodly number of small children maimed and murdered. This is what America is supporting. This is what the IDF is inflicting. Hamas may be making ugly, evil decisions, but “the most moral military in the world” is not required to stoop to those levels. The fact that it willingly does so says a lot about how a nation built from the ashes of the Holocaust has completely lost its way. The fact that we’re arming and funding that force shows we haven’t learned from our own ugly past.
CEASEFIRE NOW.
Puerto Rico, Guam, the Marianas Islands, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands are all territories, and they do not have full rights. That makes them colonies.