“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip: There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” —Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister, in a statement made last week.
This is not the language of self-defense; these are the types of words that get used before an annihilation begins, and they are the words by which Israel — a state claiming to act in the name and defense of the Jewish people — has gone to war in Gaza.
I am not here to argue that Hamas’s recent taking of defenseless hostages and slaughter of innocent civilians constitutes the righteous work of decolonization. These horrors are stomach-churning, and I mourn alongside those at the College whose loved ones were killed at the hands of Hamas.
Having said that, it strikes me as a serious possibility that a voice on this campus may soon emerge, one purporting to speak for something like “the Jewish community’s perspective” on the crisis unfolding in Israel and Palestine. Call it a lack of faith, or maybe just a dose of ungenerous skepticism, but I don’t get the feeling that such a voice would speak for me.
The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International — in spite of any gripes held against these organizations, it can hardly be said that the three of them comprise a hotbed of militant radicalism and leftist lunacy. And yet, their language this past week has been utterly unambiguous: A catastrophe is raining down upon the Gazan people.
Refugee camps bombed, schools leveled, international aid workers refused access to the dead and the dying. Half a million people displaced. Access to clean water impeded, and a dire shortage of medicine, on top of the 2,750 Palestinian civilians killed and 9,700 injured as of Monday. Just a few nights ago, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered an impossible number of people — the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza — to leave their homes and move south within 24 hours or risk facing the “unprecedented might” of Israel’s military.
However morally outrageous our community finds it to refer to the recent crimes of Hamas as reasonable violence waged in the name of self-determination, this much is clear: It is unconscionable to refer to Israel’s destructive and disproportionate retaliation as reasonable violence waged in the name of self-defense.
I’m not the first American Jew to say it and I won’t be the last, but my country doesn’t buy bullets for Hamas, and the gassing of my ancestors isn’t invoked as a moral buttress each time those bullets are put to use. The same cannot be said for the bombs currently flattening a small strip of caged land on which two million people live, almost half of whom have yet to turn 18.
The patients lying in hospitals trying to run without electricity and the children trying to dodge mortar shells in refugee camps once considered safe are not “human animals.” They’re people — they may look different than some of us, and the assumed contents of their hearts may frighten some of us — but they are people, and we ought to act accordingly.
But by the looks of it, we will not. By the looks of it, things will get worse, and the casualty counts will grow incomprehensible, and a good amount of the people I love will come to tell me that even if it all looks pretty ugly from over here, “We’re just doing what has to be done.”
Violence begets violence. That is not a threat or a prediction but a rule well-established by history, and it seems ridiculous to imagine that an 8-year-old kid who later today watches his parents get pulled out from beneath the rubble of their Jabalia apartment will, in 10 years’ time, harbor many kind thoughts towards the citizens of Israel, towards the Jewish people in whose defense — it will be claimed — the bombs were dropped.
After these next few unimaginable months have gone by, when the bodies on either side have been counted and the streets of Gaza finally resemble a long-abandoned hell, don’t insult me by saying it was all done for us.
Julian Speyer ’24 is an English major from Los Angeles, Calif.
