The
violence in Gaza and Israel is bringing
horrifying new levels of human suffering to
both Israelis and Palestinians.
Both
sides have committed heinous violations of
international law, and all attacks on
civilians must be condemned. But if we’re
serious about preventing such horrors in the
future, we have to go beyond condemnation.
A
lesson we ignore at our peril is that
oppression undermines not only the rights,
dignity, and lives of the oppressed, but
eventually the security of the oppressors as
well. The apartheid system that’s been
suffocating Palestinians for so long is now
also undermining the safety of ordinary
Israeli civilians. They’ve become victims of
the same system.
We
can’t understand how we got here — or how to
end the crisis — until we grapple with the
immensity of Palestinian suffering. And for us
in the United States, it means confronting the
role our government and tax dollars play in
enabling that oppression to continue.
Explosions
of violence never just happen. Since 2007,
Gazans have lived under siege, prohibited from
leaving their open air prison by a
high-security militarized wall and platoons of
Israeli soldiers.
Well
before the latest escalation, the transit of
most goods was banned. Gazans couldn’t get
construction materials to repair the apartment
blocks, power plants, water treatment
facilities, hospitals, school, mosques, and
churches that Israel bombed repeatedly — in
2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021.
Emergency
medical permits were often denied, leaving
many Gazans to die without care.
Electricity
was already limited. A 72-year-old woman in
Gaza told a reporter last January, “It is hard
to imagine, but we used to experience 24 hours
of electricity each day in Gaza; now
we are lucky if we get six.”
Water
was already unavailable except by expensive
purchases from Israeli water companies. And
food has long been scarce — by the age of two,
20 percent of Gaza’s
children are already stunted.
Now
that long-running siege is much worse.
On
October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant called for a “total siege” of Gaza.
“No electricity, no food, no water, no gas —
it’s all closed,” he said. For Gaza’s already
impoverished and malnourished population,
that’s not just collective punishment — it’s
genocide.
Hospitals
will be unable to treat patients. Families
will starve or die of thirst.
Gallant
is transforming an existing long-term risk of
early death into an immediate, lethal threat.
It’s a policy consciously and specifically
designed to kill innocent children, babies,
elders — everyone.
Human
rights experts, UN officials, faith leaders,
and others have warned for years that the
systemic oppression rights
groups now identify as apartheid would
one day be too much to stand. Resistance would
be inevitable.
For
decades, Palestinian resistance has taken
overwhelmingly non-violent forms. But the
world didn’t hear — or if it heard, it didn’t
answer. When the UN warned in 2012 and 2015
that by 2020 Gaza would be “unlivable” without a “herculean
effort” by the international community, the
world didn’t respond.
This
time the resistance took a violent form,
including Hamas targeting civilians in
horrifying and illegal ways. Those
illegitimate acts must be condemned. But if
we’re serious about preventing violence — all
violence — we need to remember they didn’t
come out of nowhere.
We
need to change the conditions from which this
brutality sprang.
Sending
more bombs, warplanes, guns, and bullets won’t
solve the problem. We’ve been providing Israel
billions of our tax dollars —supplying
20 percent of Israel’s entire military
budget —
for years. And we’ve done it without putting
any conditions on an Israeli military that’s
enforced a brutal siege and is indiscriminately
bombing Gaza today.
That
must end. We also need to stop protecting
Israel from being held accountable in the
International Criminal Court, and we need to
stop vetoing virtually every UN resolution
criticizing Israeli violations of human
rights.
None
of those things makes any attacks on civilians
legal or morally acceptable. And Hamas’s
cruelty must not be used to justify more
brutality against millions of innocent
Gazans, half
of whom are under 19 and
have lived through at least five Israeli wars
already.
We
need an immediate ceasefire right now. And we
need to hold our own government accountable —
which includes stopping Washington’s enabling
of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Palestinians
have been paying the price
for
this apartheid system for generations.
In
the recent attacks, innocent Israelis
paid
a huge price for that system as well.
It’s
time to end it.
