Whose Genocide?

In my historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us I repeatedly describe a pattern by white Americans of projecting their own racist violence onto the Native, Black, and Mexican people they murdered. For example when Ezekiel Payne prepares to leave a burning Black Tulsa, he reflects on a life time of observing white racist violence:

The lynchings were always followed by panicked reports in the white press of armed Black men on the way to exact vengeance. Back in ’07 the whites of Henryetta had nearly fled the town because they feared that the 1300 rounds of ammunition they had stockpiled would not be enough to stop the 35 armed Black men they heard were coming for them: more than seven 5-round magazines for each imaginary invader! In the case of Okemah, they said it was the entire town of Boley, ten miles away, that was supposedly coming to kill the white people, and – Ezekiel supposed – outrage their women. Sheriff Dunnegan armed every white man in Okemah, prepared for an attack that – like the one expected in Henryetta – never came. From that day on, Okemah was a sundown town.

It was the consistency of this pattern, from town to town, from state to state, that made Ezekiel think that all these white folks were actually reading from the same secret script. But sometimes he had an even darker thought. Sometimes he imagined that white guilt and white fears were so strong – and so uniform – that it resulted in these common patterns of violence and blame. What if white folks were so filled with guilt and shame for their own crimes that they imagined an army of Black people retaliating against them because it would have to be so in any just universe? What if white folks had to bar Negroes from their towns because they couldn’t look them in the eye after the atrocities they had committed against them? What if white folks imagined that colored folks were impervious to bullets because they knew their own actions were demonic and thought God himself was sending avenging Black angels to destroy them? And – finally – what if those loathsome postcards of their victims that they all kept as souvenirs were meant to reassure them that these Black angels were, in fact, mortal?

We still see this today when the press fearfully speculates after a police murder about protests “turning violent,” as if they have already forgotten the violence that people are protesting!

And now I see the US Congress and various universities worrying about calls for genocide against my Jewish people? In the last two months alone the Israeli military has killed roughly 20,000 Gazans and Israeli civilians have murdered over 250 West Bank Palestinians. More than half the homes in Gaza are gone, along with universities, churches, and mosques. Israel has control over food, water, electricity, and communications. It has advanced weapons: warplanes, warships, missiles, nuclear warheads. It is systematically pushing Gazans from more portions of what is, after all, a 25-mile by 8-mile strip, leaving them nowhere to go.

This is the genocide. Worrying about a genocide of Jewish people is either a guilty projection or a conscious misdirection.

I will always be proud of my heritage and religion. But I am increasingly ashamed of the atrocities committed by some who claim to share them. I am increasingly ashamed of the willful blindness of others who deny that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians and - instead - insist that we are the ones who live in fear.

Jewish values demand an end to the genocide.

Israel goes full Schutzstaffel in Gaza

 Okay, sure, complicated. 

The Israeli prime minister is on trial for bribery and fraud. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis had been protesting in the streets for months against his move to undermine the country’s court system. 

The Minister of Justice (and Deputy PM) opposes Palestinian residence anywhere in Israel or the territories it has illegally occupied for the last 56 years, despite signing treaties to protect and safeguard a Palestinian state. He drafted the law undermining the courts. He hobnobs with organized crime figures.

The Minister of National Security has repeatedly pulled his gun on unarmed Arabs and then told arrived police officers to shoot them. He leads hate marches through Arab neighborhoods. His personal hero is Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli American terrorist who shot 154 Ramadan worshippers in a Hebron mosque, killing 29 of them. His slogan is, “We are the landlords,” apparently meaning that he is allowed to do anything to Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories.

Even before October 7, extrajudicial violence by Israelis against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank had accelerated under this new government. This included shootings and beatings; burning of homes and olive groves; and vandalism and destruction of infrastructure, especially water lines and cisterns. 

This prime minister and his government absolutely ignored the intelligence reports that Hamas was preparing a major attack on Israel. It told the Border Patrol to shut up about what they were seeing and just do what they were told. Incompetence? Stupidity? Underestimating the sheer scale of the attack Hamas was planning? Actually hoping for the attack so they could use it to halt the demonstrations and launch a genocidal attack on both Hamas-controlled Gaza and the West Bank? I’ll bet on all of the above.

Now Israel’s paid apologists are feeding the infosphere with endless reminders of the sheer horror of the Hamas raid - 1200 massacred, over 200 taken hostage - as if that justifies their own massacre of 15,000 Gazan civilians (as of yesterday) and another 250 Palestinians in the West Bank. As if that justifies the absolute destruction of churches, mosques, medical centers, office buildings, and apartment houses by advanced munitions. As if that justifies the forced relocation of Gazans to the southern portion of the 25-mile long coastal strip, and - now - the orders to evacuate the south!

But Israeli propagandists don’t only rely on the truth of the Hamas massacre. During the pause in their military operations for prisoner exchange they insisted on differentiating the hostages held by Hamas from the prisoners held by Israel, arguing that the latter were all convicted murderers. That is an easily disproven lie because most of the people released by Israel were administrative detainees, people who had never been charged with any crime at all, and certainly never tried in any court. 

Among the best known is Ahed Tamimi. She first gained international notice in 2012 when she was 11 for trying to stop an Israeli policeman from arresting her mom during a peaceful march against the occupation in their village. The story of that village and the Tamimi family can be found in The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by American freelance journalist Ben Ehrenreich.  Last year she published her own memoir, They Called Me a Lioness.

When Ahed was 16-years old she was caught on video slapping an Israeli soldier. That soldier had just shot her younger cousin with a rubber bullet from close range, putting him in a coma. She served eight months in Israeli prison, during which she was able to complete high school and earn her diploma. The Israeli poet Yehonatan Geffen wrote of her in 2018:

,את, אהד תמימי
,אדומת השיער
,כמו דוד שסטר לגולית
תהיי באותה שורה עם
.ז'אן דארק, חנה סנש ואנה פרנק

An English translation reads:

You, Ahed Tamimi,
The red-haired,
Like David who slapped Goliath,
Will be counted among the likes of
Joan of Arc, Hannah Senesh and Anne Frank.

In November Ahed was arrested again when her Insta was hacked and somebody put up a hateful post against all Jewish people. Characterizing her as a convicted murderer of Jews is more than a stretch. 

The Israeli military is pursuing a calculated policy of emptying Gaza of Palestinians: by mass murder, by threats of mass murder, and by evacuation orders followed by mass murder. This is genocide. It is genocide regardless of what you say about the Hamas attack that preceded it. It is genocide regardless of whether you believe the Israeli government invited that attack on purpose or through arrogance and stupidity. If you believe that Israel has some special historic right to commit genocide, then you have learned nothing of Jewish law, religion, ethics, or history.