The Nothingness of a War Consciousness

The leaders of the world must assert common humanity and create a new path, a new map which is fair to all, and establish a new, peaceful coexistence which recognizes the inner equality of all

We are now being presented, several times a day, with media examples of the effect of extreme violence visited on the captive people of Gaza.  The images are heartbreaking. The reality unbearable.  

Bodies of Palestinian families strewn like refuse along a road  that they had trekked as a path to safety. 

A car turns around at a checkpoint in Gaza, its occupants are hit with a shot from behind, from a tank and everything, the car and its occupants, disappear in a puff. 

A Palestinian journalist mourns his colleague, who only a half hour earlier, was reporting on air.  After work, he went home, a bomb hit, killing him and his 11-member family.

The video of his ruined house shows several children’s party dresses that lie amidst the rubble. 

The human family is in the rubble.

An ambulance convoy, filled with injured Gazans, under the supervision of medical authorities, headed to the Rafah border crossing, was struck  by the Israeli air force with the stated suspicion that the vehicle, which was  headed away from the battle, carried Hamas fighters.

War reduces all nothingness. 

It is as if 10,000 Palestinians and more had never existed.  But they did, just as the 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7 existed.   They had birthdates, names, fragile exchanges of human emotion, of love of family, private moments in everyday life that confirmed their existence.  Obliterated.  Nothingness.

Whatever media we consume, we see only a fraction of the massive display of inhumanity occurring in Gaza, the reduction of living, breathing, feeling people to objects.   This is heartless.  This is soulless.  This reduces all of existence to the nothingness of smoke, human smoke.     

The violence it is calculated.  It is rooted in power politics, in racism, in apartheid, in  twisted history,  opportunism disguised as vengeance, statecraft as slaughter. 

We in America, are paying for the extermination of our fellow humans.  Our weapons are creating carnage against helpless people.  Our aircraft, our ships, our troops have entered the fray, greatly outnumbered.

But we are not helpless. We must demand, now, that our government take a new direction, and soon, not only for a cease fire, but a ceasing of war,  the end of arms sales to fuel war, the end of 800 military bases around the world; the end of the theft of our tax dollars for killing; the end of policies that pit people against each other, the end of the destructive psychology justifying violence to maintain  “strategic balance,” the end of the false justifications for sending our troops into harm’s way. 

It is an unfathomable, beyond the Orwellian, to commit ethnic cleansing and call it defense, to preach democratic values while practicing apartheid, to claim wholesale theft of property a right, to take Palestinians, their homes, kill their children, destroy their family, their culture, their history and deem it the fulfillment of a prophecy ordained by God.  

That this genocide is being visited upon the Palestinians by the descendants of those who suffered the utterly condemnable, indelible inhumanity of the Holocaust is incomprehensible.  After all, who has suffered more than the Jews during the Holocaust?  Entire families wiped out in a racist elimination plan.  

The awful killings of innocent Israelis on October 7 and the wave of anti-Jewish sentiment that followed are a powerful reminder of vulnerability of Jews everywhere. 

But the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank brings back greater risks for the survival of Israel itself and all those who dwell within. 

Do not assume that it is only the artifacts of the humble, daily lives of Palestinians that lay buried in bomb craters.  The America that could be, our own hopes and dreams for a prosperous and secure nation, lie alongside the bodies of the men, women and children in those ruins. 

Let us stand for the survival of both Jews and Arabs.  Otherwise we are all participants in the massacres that have been and those that are yet to come.  The leaders of the world must assert common humanity and enact a cessation of this madness and create a new path, a new map which is fair to all, and establish a new, peaceful coexistence that recognizes the inner equality of all.    

We are called to take sides.   Let us take the side of peace.  Let us take the side of reconciliation.  Let us take the side of restoration.  Let us take the side of humanity.

Let us all speak out against this descent into madness, into nothingness. And we Americans must demand our government heal our own nation, serve our own people,  and use our precious resources to improve the lives of all Americans.