I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

– William Stafford, from A Ritual to Read to Each Other

 

I don’t want to be writing this. Probably there are better things for me to be doing.

Especially because the massacre in Gaza has been going on so long and people with the ability to stop it do nothing—except enable more killing. The actuality of it keeps boring and twisting into my heart and conscience, comes out the other side, then turns and corkscrews back in. My primal scream about Gaza is deafening to me but seems to have the effective decibel range of a mouse squeak.

But squeak I must.

There are issues about which good people can disagree—like whether Jackson Pollock is a great painter, whether Catholicism is superior to Protestantism, or whether the oboe’s tone is better than the clarinet’s.

But good people—because good people believe in facts and history—cannot disagree about the criminality of Trump, or about our crisis of climate and environment, or cannot disagree about seventy-seven years of ethnic cleansing, and brutal military occupation of Palestine by Israel. And the facts say there should be no disagreement about the vicious horror of the genocide in Gaza. 

When I was a kid in the 1950s, we watched—aghast—newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in  Dachau and Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. What kind of monsters could do this to other human beings? We reacted with revulsion and hatred. Was such a reaction wrong? Of course not. These acts were the definition of crimes against humanity. The intention of showing those films was so everyone in the world would cry out, “Never Again!”

Today we see the sadistic cruelty of the Israelis as they murder thousands of children, women, doctors, food providers, journalists—everyone!—in Gaza. Are we wrong to revile the acts of the perpetrators? Of course not. These are the acts of people who have become moral monsters. To abhor their actions and criticize them is not anti-semitic. Not to criticize them is anti-human. 

Our major media, our political class, our academics obsess about Trump and Trumpism—his arrogance, his mendacity, his narcissism, his racism, his fascism, the impunity with which he casually ignores the Constitution and makes huge profits from blatant corruption. It’s as though the country is in an idiot’s thrall to this one man’s demolition derby. Spellbound by the Trump show, we worry that his erratic tariffs may delay flotillas of container ships from China. What will bare shelves in Walmart and Target do to the Spirit of Christmas?

Why aren’t we asking what the refusal of the Israelis to allow a single ship of mercy into Gaza says about the spirit of Chirist?

If we judge Trump—as we should—for the fascist cruelty of his policies in this country, but fail to hold this government accountable for supporting genocide in Gaza, arming Israel (just as Biden did), not condemning the atrocity of it, having our weapons dealers make obscene profits from this genocide, all of us in this country become complicit in genocide. As we decry our red and blue partisanship, our inability to talk with each other to solve critical issues, we should be absolutely speechless that genocide is taking place and our government—maybe the only entity with the agency to stop it—says nothing. Nothing! Was it genocide when it was done to Jews, but not genocide when they do it?

This is not an issue about which good people should disagree. Equivocation is a kind of self-inflicted ethical castration. I began the Americans Who Tell the Truth project because the United States was justifying crimes against humanity in Iraq. AWTT continues because more lies are justifying more atrocities. We have a political leadership who want our schools not to teach the moral sins of our past—native genocide, slavery, exploitation of workers, racism, illegal wars. If we make the truth of the past invisible, the purity of our motives can never be questioned. Exceptional people are exceptionally innocent, exceptionally good. When we make the truth of the present invisible, we align ourselves with all of history’s monsters.