Genocide is the Clear Line Between Humanity and Inhumanity
Why I support people of heart, Jews of conscience, and the triumph of the human spirit over arguments that justify violence against the innocent.
“That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor.”— Hillel the Elder, first Jewish philosopher, theologian, and scholar, first century BC.
“We are imposing a complete siege in the city of Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals (Palestinians) and we are acting accordingly.”— Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, October 9th, 2023, just two days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack:
”After eight months of protest, Israel is rallying to change their government, but Israelis are not going to rally to put themselves in danger. So instead of trying to (organize) activists around the world… to dismantle Israel, they should actually work with (sympathetic) Israelis and with Palestinians to transform Israel.”— Israeli peace activist and former Israel Defense Force soldier, Adar Weinreb
The battle is no longer between Left and Right, East and West, Muslim and Jew, but between those who still have a functioning conscience and those who appear to have lost their souls entirely. If one cannot follow the great Jewish philosopher Hillel’s clear dictum to not do to others what is hateful to the self, what humanity has one left?
When shall we, the people of heart, be evolved and numerous enough to take on the rampant and callous inhumanity that assails us in this time of change. It is so easy to simply say, “I do the abominable because… them.” When will “love your enemy” triumph over “destroy your enemy”? When will we refuse to sacrifice the innocent and the powerless in a proxy war ultimately against the presence of spiritual human conscience?
It is not just the orgy of violence against the innocent that sickens and appalls me, the over 10,000, mostly women and children, killed in Gaza in retribution for an attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians. More so, it is silence, excusing and even glorification of this slaughter. “Herem,” the Hebrew Bible practice in which the Jewish God Yahweh repeatedly commands, as a sacred duty, the complete murder of every man, woman, and child from the “unclean” tribes, has now become a reawakened mandate in the heartless minds of some.
The word (“herem”) is often used in the 6th and 7th chapters of the Book of Joshua, where Jericho came under herem. This meant it had to be completely destroyed, except for "the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron" which were to go into "YHWH's treasury" (Joshua 6:19)
Spiritual and moral sickness
When protecting innocent Palestinian children in a time of war becomes anti-semitism, and when a pro-Israel march on Washington devolves into chants of “No Cease Fire”, we have entered into new and perilous moral terrain. Even Hillel’s quote can be weaponized if “neighbor” means simply members of your own tribe and not ALL the children of God, i.e. ALL children PERIOD. Hillel’s quote is preceded by this line from Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
Hysteria and mania, passions and identifications, offer no excuse in the face of genocide. Genocide is the one true and clear separator of those who would act according to a fundamental human conscience and those who skitter, morally blind and deaf, to their various wailing walls and identity corners to defy the soul-beckoning fact that “all people are created equal.”
The so-called Left lost its mind over Covid, going all in on Big Pharma, vaccine mandates, and censorship which has resulted in the death, injury, and silencing of millions of people. Now the alleged Right along with the Establishment neo-liberal Left have followed suit with an unprecedented and blind excusing and censoring of the current slaughter in Gaza and the past decades of apartheid treatment of Palestinian people. Even people of the so-called libertarian left like Kate Wand and vaccine efficacy debunker Norman Fenton in their interview betrayed enormous ignorance on the issue, justifying for the scorched earth strategies of the Israeli response, and, in Fenton’s case, even denying and defending the Nakba of 1948 (the forced dispossession of Palestinians from their homes by Israeli forces)!
It is fast become moral necessity for the survival of morality itself that people broadly civilly disobey, resist, and refuse to cooperate, much less celebrate, this current sadistic, illiberal, and devolutionary mania and bloodlust. What is going on right now is outright and unapologetic ethnic fascism. This means calling out conservatives like Jordan Peterson, Megyn Kelly, rabid Zionist Ben Shapiro and a host of others on the so-called Left and Right who tacitly or overtly defend Israel’s “right to defend” itself by retaliating on civilian populations. All must oppose a looming second Nakba in which Israel claims for itself the little remaining Palestinian land.
Israel’s leaders no longer pretend its counteroffensive is about Hamas (though it constantly mouths such justificatory pablum). Many top leaders in the Netanyahu administration are openly declaring what they had in mind all along— extermination or expulsion of the Palestinian people, complete annihilation of Palestinian nationhood, and a violent takeover of their lands.
As with “herem,” the new gold, silver, and bronze is constituted by the over 453 billion dollars of newly discovered oil and natural gas, under and around Gaza, that can only be accessed if Gaza is “annexed” similar to the Russian takeover of the Crimean oil fields. The plan has been long in the making— create intolerable conditions and surveillance, bomb, murder and assassinate civilians, repeatedly and egregiously violate international law, establish illegal “settlements” in occupied territory against the rules of military engagement, bulldoze houses and fields of olive trees, and finally initiate bald genocide in order to illegally occupy and take over another country for its resources.
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) recently put out a poorly-done propaganda video ostensibly showing Hamas weapons in a hospital (and thus justifying Israeli attack of Palestinian hospitals). This was reported widely in the Western press as fact. Oops. Then comes another debunked propaganda video that portrayed an Israeli actress, posing as a Palestinian Muslim nurse (complete with fake bomb noises in the background) encouraging, in a fake panic, all Palestinians to leave northern Gaza (which just so happens to be the region with access to the aforementioned multi-hundreds-of-billions of dollars in oil and gas resources).
Will we simply let this happen?
American Jews of conscience such as Miko Peled, Max Blumenthal, Dan Cohen (whose film, along with Max Blumenthal, Killing Gaza, is a must-see), Glenn Greenwald, and Katie Halper and even deeply religious Jews within Israel, warn of the moral and eventual political destruction of Israel in response to its unapologetic barbarity. Another Jewish woman, Jill Stein, just days ago announced her run for President of the United States on the Green Party ticket. She is the only candidate who opposes the conduct of this war against the powerless and who is calling for an outright cease fire. Even supposedly anti-war Robert F Kennedy Jr. is calling for “unequivocal support” of Israel, and is ignoring the current genocide in favor of geo-political arguments for alliance with Israel. This is why I no longer will be voting for him, even after I met him personally and received the impression that he is a decent man.
Ignorance is no excuse.
Upon meeting RFK Jr, personally, I recommended he speak to Miko Peled, an Israeli general’s son and reformed Zionist, about the apartheid state of Israel and Palestine. I suspect RFK Jr. won’t be doing that, now that Miko Peled said the following on Sabby Sabs podcast:
I gotta say something about this RFK thing. I don’t know what is worse: the fact that he’s stupid or the fact that he is ignorant. In this particular clip, there is a convergence between his stupidity and his ignorance which is so glaring. First of all, the U.S. has other allies: Egypt is an ally, Saudi Arabia is an ally, Jordan is an ally, Iraq used to be an ally (and) they have oil and buy weapons from America… He forgot to mention the U.S.S. Liberty where U.S. service men were massacred by the Israeli military. Jonathan Pollard, who was (an Israeli) spy (against the United States) who sat in an American jail for 30 years and then was received (in Israel) as a hero. Rachel Corrie (an American pro-Palestinian activist murdered by the Israeli military)… There is nothing at all about what (RFK Jr) said that is fundamentally true.
It is important at this point to stringently emphasize an important distinction, to avoid conflation between REAL and RHETORICAL anti-semitism as well as ethnicism of all types: This is not about “the Jews” (especially given the aforementioned Jews of conscience) but Israeli leaders of an apartheid Jewish ethno-state called Israel (sometimes referred to as “Zionists” and “Zionism”), who believe in their heart of hearts that they are exceptional and superior and that other peoples of the world deserve to be treated as animals for the service of an apartheid ethnicist system.
Even the pro-Israel Anti Defamation League had to disclaim the remarks of a massively popular Israeli rabbi, who said the quiet part out loud and claimed that the only purpose of a non-Jew was to serve a Jew.
During an October 16 sermon, Rabbi Yosef, spiritual leader of Israel's Shas Party, reportedly said, "Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel … Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat… (That is why gentiles were created.)"
Kim Iverson, from the Kim Iversen Show, explains the historical context succinctly in her tweet on X:
Truth, love, and courage are the ways forward. Do not agree to unequal and profane treatment
Truth: Get informed about the real situation and not top-down propaganda.
Love: Love your enemy, and call out yourself and others to a higher, more humane reality, even those your disagree with.
Courage: Have the chutzpah to speak the truth, even if you may face disapproval.
To my mind, the best moral rendition of the current Gaza bombing and seige so far, is the one offered by a former intelligence chief, Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal. His short speech at the Baker Institute deserves to be read in its entirety as a road map for peace and the “better angels” of human moral, political and spiritual evolution. It serves as a fitting conclusion:
All militarily occupied people have a right to resist their occupation even, militarily. I do not support the military option in Palestine. I prefer the other option— civil insurrection and disobedience. It brought down the British Empire in India and the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe. Israel has overwhelming military superiority, and we see in front of our eyes the devastation and oblivion it is bringing to the people of Gaza.
I categorically condemn Hamas's targeting of civilian targets of any age or gender, as it is accused of. Such targeting belies Hamas's claims to an Islamic identity. There is an Islamic injunction against the killing of innocent children, women, and elders. The injunction is also against the desecration of places of worship. I also condemn Hamas is gifting of the the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public as fascist miscreant and abhorrent. I condemn Hamas for giving this awful government the excuse to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its citizens and bombing them to oblivionl I condemn Hamas for further undermining the Palestinian Authority as Israel has been doing. I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people, but equally I condemn Israel's indiscriminate bombing of of Palestinian innocent civilians in Gaza and the attempt to forcibly drive them into Sinai.
I condemn Israeli targeted killing and the indiscriminate arrest of Palestinian children, women, and men in the West Bank. Two wrongs don't make a right. I've been hearing a repeated phrase in American Media: “unprovoked attack.” What more provocation is required to make it provoked than what Israel has done to the Palestinian people for three quarters of a century? I refer you to the article in the Middle East Monitor of February 17th 2014 under the title “Israeli Army Veterans admit role in Massacre of Palestinians in 1948.” Read It and weep, as I did. Just this year from May to July over 450 Palestinians were killed including 67 children. his bloodletting must stop.
I condemn Israel's stealing of Palestinian lands. I condemn Israeli colonists for rampaging through houses of worship in the AKA mosque in Jerusalem. I condemn Israel for destroying Palestinian homes and olive orchids. I condemn Israel for incarcerating Palestinian women, children, and men in concentration camps without recourse to due process. I condemn Israel's targeted killings and assassinations of Palestinians. I condemn Israel for funneling Qatari money to Hamas, the terrorist group as defined by Israel.
I condemn Western politicians for shedding tears when Israelis are killed by Palestinians but refuse to even express sorrow when Israelis killed Palestinians. There are no heroes in these conflicts, only victims, ladies and gentlemen. The Arab peace initiative is the only viable alternative to this bloodbath. Israel should seize (this initiative) with all that it can muster of political, economic, and military might. Similar to America's Vietnam debacle Israel just suffered its own Tet Offensive… that led to the North Vietnamese’s own Tet offensive, leading to (President Lyndon) Johnson’s not running (for office) again. Whether Netanyahu will resign, we'll have to wait and see. Thank you for listening to me.
What does your own heart and deeper morality say on this matter. Share in the comments below.
Unfortunately, my heart says the Saudi, Al-Faisal, is a complacent fool who has never suffered significant hunger in his entire spoilt life, has not thought about what he would do if he were in Gaza under Israeli rule. He wants peace with an unlawful occupying genocidal 'state' so that he and his buddies can make lots of money, irrespective of what they do to his brethren people. Would he condemn Hamas after the IOF killed his entire family, destroyed all the infra-structure and was starving his people to death? The man is an opinionated fool.