Elie Wiesel on indifference. A child killed in Gaza every 15 minutes. Two mothers every hour. Seven women every two hours. Are you OK with that?

Newsletter #150

This is the 150th issue of my newsletter and I’m feeling anything but celebratory. Sorrow, apprehension, and dread is more like it. My sole subject today is the Israel-Hamas war — not the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, divergent historical narratives, or the toxic discourse around “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” etc. I’m fixated on the littlest and least powerful Palestinians, and the largest, most commanding Jewish imperatives.

Years ago, Elie Wiesel, perhaps the world’s pre-eminent Holocaust survivor, uttered words that echo now with stark urgency:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides.” Acceptance speech, Nobel Peace Prize 1986.

“Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes.” “The Perils of Indifference,” 1999 speech at the White House,

* Indifference is not an option for me. I side with those who have no guns, bombs or public advocates. When Hamas fighters stormed through security barriers and unleashed their horrific rampage, 10/7 joined 9/11 as an infamous landmark in time. Yet, as news broke that Israeli toddlers had been burned alive while clinging to their parents, and girls and women had been raped, sexually abused, and mutilated, rather than eliciting sympathy or empathy, the response from some corners of the world was a sickening indifference, a blizzard of rationalization, or worse yet, eruptions of elation.

*Now “horrific” describes the carnage on the other side of the border: 30,000 Palestinians killed, 67% of them women and children, and 70,300 injured. As one commentator put it, “Israel’s bombardment produces an October 7th every six days.”

*There’s a tragic metaphor in the war’s gendered symmetry: Palestinian women and children comprise the same proportion of all casualties in Gaza (67%) as did the percentage of women and children relative to all casualties caused by Hamas in Israel. To put a fine point on it, UN Women, the agency that focuses on gender issues, says seven women are killed every two hours in Gaza. Two mothers are killed every hour. Because statistics released by the Gaza Health Ministry do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, I want to underscore what it means for 67 out of every 100 casualties to be women and children: It means the overwhelming majority of Israel’s victims were, by definition, neither combatants nor terrorists.

*Despite its well-meant warnings, and rejection of accusations that its bombing is indiscriminate, the Jewish State keeps killing innocent people, a fact that should affront not just world Jewry but everyone with a conscience.

* Last week, in what’s been dubbed “the flour massacre,” a large crowd of Gazans who’d spent hours awaiting a convoy carrying food supplies was fired upon by Israeli troops. Authorities have yet to clarify exactly what happened but 117 were killed, 750 injured. Those are terrible numbers. Unseen behind them are hundreds of already malnourished children who will go to sleep hungry or die of starvation because those trucks never made their deliveries.

MEET THE VICTIMS

*Don’t look away.

*Statistics are bloodless. It takes images such as those above and below, and the searing portraits in a recent NYTimes photo feature, to scald the heart. Most hearts, that is. Apparently not those of the whopping majority of Israeli Jews who, according to the poll below, are indifferent to the IDF inflicting ever more suffering on the Gazan population, even though most of those killed and injured are old women, pregnant women, nursing moms, toddlers, and infants who bear no responsibility for the sins of Hamas.

* I believe Oct 7 must never be forgotten but neither should it be used to pervert our neshama (Jewish soul) and harden our hearts to the agony of the Other. Some Israel supporters rationalize those chilling responses to questions 15 and 16 based on the nation’s trauma having been compounded by the stunning realization that the Israel they thought was invincible wasn’t. Betrayed by their corrupt prime minister and his self-serving government, they also discovered that Israel’s legendary intelligence operatives were asleep at the switch. And the IDF was otherwise occupied guarding Jewish settlements in the West Bank at the behest of the self-described antiArab fascist racist, Itamar Ben-Gvir. But a convoluted, fascinating, somewhat self-serving yet honestly self-critical discussion between two Israeli scholars at Jerusalem’s Hartman Institute concluded that Israelis’ grievances don’t add up to victimhood and can’t be claimed to justify the country’s conduct in Gaza.

* To get a sense of what “the next phases of the fighting” looks like on the ground, take two seconds to dwell on the photo of one little boy. (above). Or the exposed face in the child-sized body bag.

* Take 30 seconds to watch this video. Then steel yourself before clicking this even more graphic one. Don’t recoil. View the grim images with an open heart, and let them move you to act. (Action suggestions at the end of this post. )

* I’m not naive. War is hell. In WWII, the U.S. and the Allies practiced the “strategic bombing” of civilian sites, even of entire cities, and most Americans knew and were gung ho about it. Today, most Americans are aware of Hamas heinous crimes —that they use civilians, including women and children, as human shields and embed their militants in the general population and their weaponry under homes, schools, and hospitals. Their stated objective for Oct 7 was to punish Israel for 76 years of occupation. However, their immediate objective was to terrify every Jewish Israeli, evoke memories of the Holocaust, and kidnap enough hostages to trade later for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, all of which would guarantee to provoke a ferocious war of revenge against the very people Hamas purports to protect.

*My parents, rabbis, and Hebrew teachers drummed into me that Jews must not do to others what others have done to us under countless rulers, in countless countries, for well over two millennia. So it’s in my DNA to feel ashamed and appalled that, despite its efforts to minimize civilian casualties, the IDF’s “over the top” bombardment of Gaza (Biden’s phrase not mine) has wrought unimaginable destruction and left thousands of Palestinian children homeless, orphaned, burned, paralyzed, blinded, maimed, crippled, scarred, and traumatized for life.

* Given all that, and constant reminders by journalists, demonstrators, and others who rightly won’t let Palestinian suffering fly under the public’s radar, I was shocked that more than 80 percent of U.S. citizens polled last week took Israel’s side in the war. Mirroring Americans’ attitude toward the Allies’ strategic bombing in WWII, respondents felt Israel’s military response was correct. I don’t believe that 8 out of 10 Americans are indifferent to Palestinian grievances or blind to the injustices Palestinians have suffered under Israeli control, or opposed to Palestinians’ right to self-determination, human dignity, and freedom. I think 8 out of 10 Americans strongly identified with Israeli victims of Oct 7, and having seen Hamas’ barbarism couldn’t — or wouldn’t — see Palestinian suffering.

* I’ll also venture that American’s fear and loathing of Hamas was matched by their admiration for the resilience of Israelis in the aftermath of Oct 7. When their prime minister was impervious to his people’s trauma, the people held each other up and turned their wrath on him. The attack ad (above) addressed to Netanyahu says, "YOU’RE THE LEADER. YOU’RE GUILTY.” (It’s a screenshot from Israeli TV which cut off the aleph at the beginning of each line.) Many Americans were impressed by how quickly Israeli Jews organized themselves to do the work their inept, insensitive government didn’t provide. They fed, helped, and housed people uprooted from border communities. Made common cause with hostages’ families. Exhibited extraordinary empathy — for their own. I’m proud of them for rising to the challenge. Even prouder of the 13 % of Jewish Israelis who still see the Other as human and who answered “quite a lot,” or “very much” to Question 15.

* Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy, recently ruminated on some of the 11,500 children killed by the IDF in the last four months: “a child killed every 15 minutes; one out of every 100 children in Gaza.” And while most Israels don’t seem inclined to consider their suffering, each little person had a name and a family and a life, however short. The casualty list includes 260 babies whose age was listed as “0.” Those infants, “didn't get to celebrate their first birthday,” laments Levy, “nor will they ever celebrate anything else. . .Then there are hundreds of names of one- and two-year old children; toddlers three or four years of age; children who were five, six, seven or eight, up to the youths who were 17 when they died.” Children who escaped death didn’t escape terror, pain, and loss.

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED TO SOME OF THEM

* Dareen al-Bayaa, 11, lost dozens of family members in a single Israeli air strike.

*12-year-old Moustafa Ahmed Shehda had his right leg amputated below the knee after he was found buried in the rubble of his uncle's bombed-out apartment building.

*Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old whose desperate pleas for help were heard around the world, was found dead after being trapped with five relatives for 12 days, hemmed in by Israel tank fire. The U.S has called for an “urgent’ probe” into her death.

*It should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway: Just as kids in Israel’s border kibbutzim did nothing to deserve being shot in cold blood or seeing their parents murdered and mutilated by Hamas, Palestinian kids did nothing to deserve the crippling injuries and miserable deaths caused by Israeli bombs.

*I’m determined that the torture and killing of Israelis on Oct 7 not be “disappeared” by subsequent events or eclipsed in the fog of war. But neither should that fog obscure or excuse the anguish inflicted by Israel on Gaza’s most vulnerable and guilt-free citizens. My reason for zeroing in on Palestinian children is simple: to discomfort the comfortable, especially in my own community, to recharge collective empathy, and to make people lose sleep thinking about just one Gazan toddler with third degree burns, or one child-size body bag in a Rafah morgue.

*Another public opinion poll that shocked me to the core was taken in late November by a research team at Tel Aviv University. It asked Israelis, “How would you characterize the IDF’s use so far of its firepower in Gaza?” By that date, Israeli bombs had already snuffed out the lives of 3600 children. Yet an astonishing 57.5% of the respondents said Israel had used “too little firepower.” Almost 37% judged the amount of firepower “appropriate.” Only 1.8% said the army used “too much.”

*That so many could show such callous indifference shamed me as a Jew. Wiesel, no stranger to suffering, would surely feel the same. He famously wrote, “Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor—never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.”

*HAMAS: DELUSIONS AND REALITY

* Feeling forgotten may partly explain why a Palestinian opinion poll shows a rise in public support for Hamas. Until the IDF’s retaliative firestorm in Gaza, the world had largely forgotten the plight of Palestinians who’d been living for decades under Israeli occupation — and since 2007 under the iron rule of Hamas.

*Putting aside for a moment, questions of morality, legality, and egomania, Netanyahu’s macho claim that he can wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” has about the same probability as NYC has of exterminating every roach or rat in the subway system. The reverse is far more likely: Every Gazan corpse leaves behind a grieving father, brothers, uncles and cousins aching to wreak revenge, fight under the Hamas flag, and become a martyr. In short, dead Palestinian babies give birth to new Palestinian terrorists.

*Hamas started this war knowing full well that ordinary people would pay the price. Yet a weird new poll found more than half of 18 to 24-year-old Americans believe Israel should "be ended and given to Hamas.” Next time you encounter a Hamas acolyte ask if they’re ready to leave their First Amendment-honoring college campuses, move to Gaza, and raise their future children under Ismail Haniyeh. And when they say “by any means necessary,” are they willing to be subject to a Hamas regime for whom that slogan defines its own behavior.

*Progressives and conservatives alike have for years turned a blind eye to how Hamas prioritizes its hatred of Israel over the well-being of its people. Rather than govern Gaza without intimidation, rather than attend to their people’s basic needs, Hamas sacrificed its resources and diverted international aid to build tunnels and stockpile weapons. If they cared about the 30,000 lost lives, they could release all the hostages in return for a ceasefire.

*Not gonna happen. The higher the Palestinian death toll and the more pitiful the suffering of Gazan women and children, the greater the sympathy for Hamas and its cause. It’s deja vu all over again. Witness this segment produced nearly 10 years ago by Andrea Mitchell. To air it tonight, all NBC would have to do is delete “Obama” and dub in “Biden.”

*How long will the U.S. tolerate Israeli bombs and bullets killing thousands of innocent people? If someone replies, “There are no innocents in Gaza;,” show them the children in this family (above). If someone says, “Gazans who don’t resist Hamas are as guilty as Hamas,” tell them to tell it to the Syrians, 613,407 of whom have been killed for rebelling against Bashar Al-Assad. For that matter, tell it to the Russians, Chinese, Guineans, Sudanese, Chadians, and Turks who seem in no hurry to challenge their authoritarian rulers. Finally, ask yourself: “If I were a surgeon in a Gaza hospital, and Hamas militants barged in and announced they were storing explosives under my operating table, exactly how would I stop them?” Resistance is easier to aspire to than accomplish.

*So what can we do to stop Netanyahu from punishing the entire population of Gaza for the gruesome acts of Hamas?

—First, don’t look away from the collateral damage — a sanitized euphemism for reducing residential neighborhoods to rubble and killing 67 blameless noncombatants out of every 100 Gazan fatalities.

—If you’re an American whose tax dollars help fund Israel’s military, more particularly, if you’re a Jewish American, face up to what the Jewish State is doing in your name.

—Make your voice heard. Protest Israel’s military strategy in Gaza but also its occupation of the West Bank. And, its likely reoccupation of Gaza. Remember, the specifics of sovereignty over both areas were supposed to be negotiated as part of a final status peace agreement.

—Demand that those who support U.S. aid to Israel also hold Netanyahu’s government accountable for its human rights abuses.

—Write or better yet, call your Senators to convey your support for the Amendment reaffirming U.S. support of “a two-state solution and the need to work toward a future in which Israel and a Palestinian state can peacefully co-exist.”

—Stop contributing to groups that fund violent, racist Jewish settlers, and start contributing to B’TseIem, which tracks human rights abuses.

A further quote from Elie Wiesel says it all: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

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Thanks for sticking with me to the end of this harangue. I’ll be back soon with my usual mix of politics, culture, feminism, mimes, cartoons, jokes, and coming events. Meanwhile, why not write a letter to the editor?