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.