The Season of Imaginary Thinking
written by Valerie Morales
We’ve never been one people. The first recorded war is believed to have occurred in Mesopotamia in 2700 B.C. when the Elamites resisted colonization by the Sumerians in the area we now know is Basra, Iraq. It’s been mentioned by more than one historian that for every one war, there are twenty wars that were avoided by negotiation and compromise. However, with revenge wars, such as Israel’s pernicious bombing of Hamas, the cost-benefit analysis is incalculable. Human life is diminished, the beauty of children is lost, parent trauma oozes like pus and festers into a dystopian-like rage, and catastrophic despair lingers into the next generation. None of that matters to the revenge war monger who is blind to the details and substantiates the cutting off of water, electricity, communication and the erasure of a people with the nefarious payback, baby.
But here’s the problem for revenge seekers in a tech world where almost everything is reduced to a video and little is pragmatic: the world takes sides after seeing the damage, carnage, lives ruined, and buildings blown to bits. The secondary war is about perception and serendipity and who can shape what through a ubiquitous lens of sympathy. Several Israeli journalists are concerned about the timeline. Eventually, the rest of the world will move towards grace, particularly as the death numbers of children dramatize the conflict. Reportedly there are more dead children in Gaza than the annual number of children killed in global conflict zones every year since 2019.
More than one hundred Palestinian children are killed every single day of the conflict and since children make up 47% of Gaza, a war against Gaza is a war against children. To think otherwise is magical thinking. “I am carrying my children on foot because they are too paralyzed in fear to walk as we search for somewhere safe. There is no safe place in Gaza as Israeli forces rain down bombs in every direction” explained Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rukbeh, a senior Gaza field researcher for Defense for Children International- Palestine. The bombs he and his children are trying to avoid are phosphorous bombs that create fire upon contact and are not able to be extinguished with water. Many believe this is the worst conflict for children in modern times and with estimates of 50% of all children in Gaza to be murdered by Israeli rockets, it is a crippling moment in history.
Unbothered, a Florida Republican named Michelle Salzman admits more should be more, enshrining a Jewish dream of Palestinian demise. Racial scapegoating is an American caveat and yet is jarring just the same. Slaves were blamed by the southern states for losing the Civil War. Blacks were labeled drug addicts in the 80s and 90s because of the crack infestation but during the same period of time more whites were addicted to cocaine, despite the draconian penalties handed out to crack users. Asians were blamed for Pearl Harbor and condemned for the pandemic outbreak and the ensuing political consequences.
Perhaps this needs repeating for the sycophantic: while Hamas terrorists are Palestinians by birth all Palestinians aren’t Hamas terrorists. A granular detail, it is glossed over as irrelevant by whites who, as a rite of passage, deviate from the main point and pathologize those who are brown.
I wonder. About the implicit bias besotting stakeholders because I remember the 2016 Unite the Right rally on the University of Virginia campus but don’t recall the effervescent Jewish angst or the doxxing of the white supremacists who were chanting “Jews will not replace us, Jews will not replace us.” Maybe I missed it but did the billionaire Jews deny the torch lighters employment or put their faces on trucks or social media timelines, calling them terrorists? Isn’t the fundamental problem one of money. That pro-Palestinian marches and the ensuing internecine fracas on east coast campuses chips away like water on rock at the luminosity of Jewish privilege. Their monochromatic rage feels somewhat surreal and misplaced because why not doxx the protesters at Butler University? Antisemites live in Indiana, too.
A few years ago I took an online class at Princeton, The Paradox of War, and the middle section of the class was a study of Hitler’s strategy and how his Plan A was to enable a firing line to dispose of the Jews as they fell into a mass grave but that was ineffective and the guards were traumatized so Hitler utilized a method that worked well for him against homosexuals and the mentally ill. Gas. Almost a century later the methodology is plainer. Bomb the Gazan people until they are dead, paralyzed, and wiped off the map.
There is something absurdly delusional about the silence of Holocaust descendants. Not a peep about the catastrophic destruction of Gaza women and children, not a trace of outrage as if Jewish pain is the only pain that is relevant or essential. Palestinian Americans in Gaza are no longer allowed to travel to the West Bank. Settler violence and the chasing of innocent Palestinians out of their West Bank homes, the killing of them, the absence of social order can’t even get an idiosyncratic shrug. ICU patients are dying like flowers in the snow because of electricity and fuel shortages. Barely the bat of an eyelash.
My friend Trisha Box calls the entire ugly, massive mess “the Holocaust Part Two.”
History is at the mercy of history writers, participants, and obscurity. The granular details often find their way into quiet graves shaping what we really don’t know. For instance, there was a man named Joachim Prinz who spoke at the March On Washington right after Mahalia sang, I’ve Been Buked and I’ve Been Scorned. Rabbi Prinz said to the National Mall “I speak to you as an American Jew.”
Twenty-five years after Prinz fled the Nazi’s he took the lectern, staring at the oppressed 250,000 majority-black audience. Prinz had devoted his life’s work to rabbinical service, Zionism, and the civil rights movement: protesting racial prejudice and segregation. His presence was a representation of feast and famine. During his March on Washington speech that is largely forgotten, a mere anecdote, he said “Neighbor is not a geographic term. It’s a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of a man’s dignity and integrity.”
What is remembered in history is the following year when Andrew Goodman was murdered in Mississippi, along with another New Yorker, a man named Micheal Schwerner who was a staff worker for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and 21-year-old James Chaney, a black Mississippi native who had been an activist since he was fourteen years old. A Jew, a white man, and a black teen died for black voter registration. It’s something Israeli writer, producer, and activist Noa Tishby cannot shake.
“The Jewish community has been there for oppressed communities for decades. The Freedom Riders were slaughtered. The Jewish people were part of the Freedom riders. We have been feeling alone. You cannot say you are a person supportive of human rights, women rights, democracy, freedom of speech, LGBTQ rights and stand with Hamas.”
But is Palestinian support a vote for Hamas or a vote against Palestinian destruction and genocide? Why can the Klan and good white people be separated at the hip but Palestinians and barbaric Hamas cannot be. Louisiana congressman Steve Scalise once told a reporter he was “David Duke without the baggage” but he wasn’t damned for softening the once upon a time KKK Grand Wizard. Why then for Jews is there no middle ground to be had when much of adulting is searching for middle ground. I’m well aware their grandparents took a vow of Never Again but does that mean atrocities are to forever be infantilized?
(For the record: Never Again implies absolute power absent limitations similar to autocracy. Jews cling to its flaws -autocracy, remember- while at the same time oppressing a vulnerable group in a similar way to their own oppression while feigning ignorance.)
It seems illogical that the abused eventually become the abusers. It should be the opposite, one would think. Jews know the pain of extermination and lost generations and fleeing for their lives so you would think on that subject, particularly the death of children, there would be sensitivity because of their own family experience and yet they are repeating what has been done to them. And proudly so. As if it is humane and moral to murder children.
The fact is by the time this war is over- wars do end- and the Palestinian death toll is in the hundreds of thousands, Hamas will still be on earth. You can’t murder an idea within a time frame of months. The carnage that Israel is leveling upon Gaza will continue to sit in the bones of the living creating another generation of Hamas-like terrorists. We’ll be back at this in the next decade until Israel bestows the same kind of empathy they want the world to have for them.
That is the why of the language, and why people crowd the streets in support of Palestinian life, why freeways are shut down, why students are walking out or staging die-ins. The lack of empathy for women and children, as if they do not matter, and secondarily the understanding that a genocidal war is one that prioritizes the deaths of women and children. The carriers and the future. Those who give life and those who are life.
It’s a sick business. War is. But apartheid is just as immoral. The keeping of two million caged in what is commonly referred to as an open air prison, and rationing their water some of the time and the rest of the time giving them dirty water, and restricting their movement, and chasing them out of homes and sometimes killing them while the police are disinterested, and disconnecting them from the world to pathologize their fear, and begging them to move south when rockets are exploding in the south, and paralyzing ICU wards. Death be not proud.
But that’s not why we are here in this terrible season of catastrophic violence even as history is prescient. We’re here because of unhealed wounds. We’re here because apartheid still haunts us. We’re here because of the oppressed and their silence; we scream because they cannot. We’re here because decency and kindness has been stolen. We’re here because of white acceptance. We’re here because of hate and objectification. We’re here because no one seems to care about the death of women and children except to kill more women and children. We’re here because land matters more than people. We’re here because we have never understood that humanity requires “suffering with” and not “suffering because.”
