The sound of silence.

Running in the desert.

Another Israeli war crime. Gaza, 2023. (Reuters, screenshot.)

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows . . ."
—Paul Simon

There have been decades of photos of dead Palestinian women and children, and kids being beaten, humiliated and imprisoned by Israeli soldiers. The historic killing rate in this “conflict” has been fairly consistent at about 40:1. 
—Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan

13 OCTOBER—First, I heard the sound: It was the swift rush of wind through a pine forest, a curious thrumming as of a thousand wings, furiously approaching from behind. I looked to the sky as a hundred birds, flying in that beautifully choreographed chaos of murmuration, swept low and swiftly over my head. I watched as the flock disappeared, weaving its way westward along the shore of Lake Chapala. It felt something like a blessing. 

And then I wandered home to learn of the Hamas attack in Israel.

Like many people, I have felt numb for days: Numb from endless war, from the useless, senseless, violence and the absolute waste of human life—numb in my heart such that I could not at first feel much of anything. 

What I thought, watching video footage of young Israeli partygoers being shot as they fled across the desert, was of all the images I’ve seen over the decades of young Palestinians running for their lives across the desert of Gaza and in the West Bank, running and being shot in the back by Israeli snipers. The cruelty of the Israeli government, which seems to know no limits, had limited my ability to feel horror at the Hamas attack. How was it that I had no feelings on this occasion? How could I be so unmoved? These were my questions. 

Such is the evil of war, I conclude, that it threatens completely to destroy our humanity as we avert our eyes, or become increasingly numb, or overcome with desperate, futile rage. 

Such are the evils of apartheid that peaceful demonstrations among the Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza have had no effect whatsoever, except to incite further violence from Israel. In a commentary published 10 October, “Uprooting the Causes of Violence in Gaza and Israel,” Phyllis Bennis describes in detail what occurred during two years of Palestinians protests:

In 2018, a series of overwhelmingly non-violent marches, organized by Ahmed Abu Artema, a young Gaza poet, and taking place inside the besieged Strip, called for an end to the blockade and freedom of movement for the Gaza population. They were met with tear gas, rubber bullets and Israeli sharpshooters taking aim at the mostly young protesters.

After two years, the result was 214 Palestinians killed, including 46 children, and more than 36,000 injured, including 8,800 children. More than 8,000 of those injured were hit by live ammunition. By the time the protests waned, in 2019, the United Nations reported that 1,700 of the protesters faced amputation of legs or arms because Gaza hospitals had insufficient health care funding to provide advanced care for those shot by Israeli snipers.

Silence in the collective West, pro-Israeli policies in the U.S., have only emboldened Israel in its systematic project of ethnic cleansing, of erasing Palestinians from the land Israel wants. Anyone who points out that Israel is an apartheid regime, anyone who supports Palestinians, anyone who criticizes Israel in anyway whatsoever is cynically accused of being anti-Semitic. 

In “Condemnation,” published 11 October in Consortium News, Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said “. . .I will not condemn Hamas.” It is a sentiment with which I find myself in sad agreement, however outrageous it may sound, because there is a point at which human beings break. 

There is a point at which so much cruelty is inflicted upon people that they fight back, however viciously, however unfairly. If ever there was a reenactment of the Biblical confrontation between David and Goliath, the attack by Hamas certainly appeared to be it: a small and inadequately equipped militia mounted on mopeds, using paragliders, staged a minor strike—putting this in a proper perspective—against a nuclear-armed nation with one of the best trained and best equipped militaries in the world—a military that receives $3.8billion a year from the United States. By all appearances it was audacious. Ultimately it proved disastrous.

Here, again, is Craig Murray:

I am extremely sorry for all those who die, as in all wars. I am sorry even for the deaths of individual Israeli soldiers, and more so for all the innocents who died and are now dying. 

But I will not condemn Hamas. 

For this I do not even need to delve into the backstory of Hamas’ initial sponsoring by Israel to split Fatah. They have grown well past that. I do not condemn Hamas because the resistance of the Palestinian people is a reflex response to their slow genocide. 

On 12 October, The New York Times published an opinion piece, “What More Must the Children of Gaza Suffer?” Its author, Fadi Abu Shammalah, executive director of the General Union of Cultural Centers in Gaza, was writing from the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza, where he lives with his wife and three children. On the day he tried to get his wife and children across the border into Egypt, Israel bombed the escape route—the only way out of Gaza.

Shammalah had this to say of the Hamas militias who staged the attack:

Many of the fighters who breached those walls . . . were born during the second intifada. Their entire experience has been Israeli military occupation, siege and devastating military assault upon assault in an enclave of 140 square miles, with unemployment and poverty rates of approximately 50 percent. This is the history, and these are the conditions that have shaped so many in Gaza, not a justification. Israel helped create these fighters by starving them of hope, dignity and a future.

Above all, the brutality of the attack by Hamas upon unarmed civilians is a mirror into which we all must look. It mirrored precisely what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for the decades since its founding: massacring civilians, and wiping out entire Palestinian villages. It reflected the brutality and injustice Israel inflicts upon Palestinians on a daily basis. It mirrored the despair and rage of an entire people living under colonial rule, people treated in the very same ways the European settlers treated the indigenous people of the Americans: killing, and then stealing, the land and homes of its inhabitants, in a massive enactment of ethnic cleansing.

The Hamas attack was blowback for decades of indignities and cruelties large and small. In that way it is comparable to the events of 9/11. Because a major motivation and justification for those terrorist attacks was America’s uncritical support for Israel and our complicity in its crimes against the Palestinians. All that I have described is the fruit of Zionism, the poisonous harvest of U.S. imperialism and foreign policy.

In the first few days after the Hamas attack, all I could feel was rage and outrage at those who bear the greatest responsibility for this recent round of atrocities: the United States and Israel itself. And now Israel is in the process of committing a massive war crime with the consent and material  support of the United States.

In the end, thousands of Palestinians will have been killed, not as an act of self-defense but of pure revenge. Israel is using the Hamas attack as an excuse to further its project of ethnic cleansing. Amid the deafening sound of the bombs falling on Gaza, the American political class—which clamors at every opportunity to declare its unwavering support for Israel—remains virtually silent as Palestinians are slaughtered. Most Americans appear to be all onboard.

Running in the desert

On the morning after the Hamas attack I began to wonder about the state of my own heart and mind. Why was I so numb? Why couldn’t I feel anything for the Israelis who had been killed? It was then that I began to pray: for all those who have been killed, for all who will be killed, for all who are suffering the horrors unfolding—and for myself, lest I lose my humanity. 

And I imagined myself as one of the young Israelis partying in the desert near Re’im, startled by the sudden appearance of armed men, confused by the strange sound that I realize is gunfire, fleeing for my life. I see them running in the desert, and I am running with them. I hear the sound of guns, of yelling, and screaming and I am the enraged man pulling the trigger, I am the terrified man running, I am the woman falling to the sand and dying. 

And I remember a card my friend Rebecca sent to me decades ago printed on the front with a Jewish saying: “Whoever saves a life saves the entire world.”

Every young person who died on the desert of Re’im that day was a mother who will never give birth, a father who will never hold his children. The murder of these Israelis, young lives cut short, represents generations of people that will never be born. They will never dance, they will never sing, they will never hear the music of birdsong. In that way, for that reason, worlds will have been destroyed. Entire worlds are being destroyed in Gaza as I type this. All these lives are not in the end Jewish or Israeli or Palestinian or Muslim. They are human.

We have made this world and our own hearts a desert. And now we are all running.

May our tears be the rain that causes the desert to bloom.

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