Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue.
Flesh and Blood – by Mr. Fish.
There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire.
The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel.
And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden.
There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.
In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder.
We have no choice.
Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue.
It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity.
It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
Primo Levi in the 1950s. (Mondadori Publishers, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
The plethora of Holocaust studies should have made this indelible point. But Holocaust studies were hijacked by Zionists.
They insist that the Holocaust is unique, that it is somehow set apart from human nature and human history. Jews are deified as eternal victims of anti-Semitism.
Nazis are endowed with a special kind of inhumanity. Israel, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington concludes, is the solution.
The Holocaust was one of several genocides carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries. But historical context is ignored and with it our understanding of the dynamics of mass extermination.
The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.
“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes,
“but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity.
It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in The Power of the Powerless, to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone.
It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”
New York City Democratic Socialists of America and Jewish Voice for Peace lead march for Gaza ceasefire an end to Israeli apartheid on Oct. 20, 2023. (4kbw9Df3Tw, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us if we permit for 10 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?
What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 16,456 children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?
Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible.
Protestors outside the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago demand an end to the genocide and U.S. aid to Israel, but inside we are fed a sickening conformity. Hope lies in the streets.
A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
Daniel Berrigan, at right, demonstrates outside a church against the Vietnam War. (Felton Davis/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book No Bars to Manhood:
“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise.
‘Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace.
There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”
The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right.
We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe.
We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious.
We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth.
If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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I see no end in sight. Zionism has perverted the American government and is in every nook and cranny. There is no one person or group that seems to be able to change this. We can only hope that the Arab world grows some cajones and obliterate the evil regime of Israel.
“Opposing Israel’s butchery in Gaza is so obvious, so common sense, such a bare-minimum, fundamental-level, Being Human 101 position that if it isn’t immediately self-evident to you after learning the basic facts, your problem is much, much deeper than whatever ideology or bias or prejudice you might happen to have. There’s something wrong with you as a person.”
-Caitlin Johnstone
Chris Hedges not only preaches, but practices. Inspiring when so many who are otherwise decent people don’t want to see; that’s how they avoid the difficult cost of having to do what is moral.
Using “tribal” is an offensive fad among Euro and colonial descendant intellectuals, currently a synonym for hostile enclaves. Historically the term “tribal” was applied to Africans, particularly sub-Saharan, and to indigenous nations of the Americas and Australia. You know; those uncivilized, dark-skinned lessers. While Euro groups are “ethnic.” The irony being traditional “tribal” people most often have rituals for defusing hostilities and don’t see their neighbors as alien. They also treat all of nature as ensouled while the allegedly civilized are masters of destruction.
However, in context Chris is making a subtle argument by using the term. The 12 tribes of Israel (or those remaining)–are they the only ones who count, or do all neighbors? To “love they neighbor as thyself” is a well known inclusive Christian commandment, but it’s based on ancient Jewish tradition as sourced in Leviticus. And it’s not about feelings, but a matter of daily moral practice.
We are at a juncture before the fall of the Empire of Lies.
We can vote for Caligula or Nero. American Politics are like shampoo Wash,Rinse,Repeat.
I’ll take the fall.
Free Free Palestine.
This is what is happening in Palestine: Unwilling to live in subjugation they choose to take the “fall”…living flesh and blood against industrial warfare of bombs, bullets and drones.
Thank you Chris, Your well written thesis gives me hope. The political alternatives of our two party system no longer represent myself as a citizen…so I, as you, must search elsewhere to understand and defend myself from the “crucifiers of our times”. I conclude that what the Romans did 2024 years ago…and why they did it….is 100% relevant to our turbulent present. Though it took a few centuries for Rome to fall…fall it did. I have observed and expect that current events will happen faster.
“A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.”
“The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right.”
The Berrigan Brothers paid a cost, many times, for their resistance. Many pro-Palestine students paid the cost of their career because resistance is right. Hopefully we can turn the tide soon.
Birds of a feather flocking together. SHAME ON YOU USrael!!! Your kind of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’…the entire world can do without. Thanks…but no thanks.
Vote Jill Stein if you have any humanity.
I agree completely.
“Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden.”
And? Who gives a rip?!
For four years she’s been number two in charge putting us on the brink of WW3 with Russia and presiding over the most heinous and sickening genocide in the modern era. To vote for Kid Killer Kamala is to have no conscience.
The ethically correct move is to refrain from voting in November, period. Do not lend any sense of legitimacy to this grotesque system of annihilation.
Before you dismiss Harris, how much did Trump give to Israel to support their genocide in Gaza?
Your point is idiotic. How much has Harris, as number two in charge, handed to the genocidal Talmudic freaks? Trump’s complicit too, barely any sane person on this issue doubts that.
Well said!
Thank you.
Leave the presidential/vote space blank, vote Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, Mickey Mouse, whoever, I don’t care. But please, please vote the down ticket. If we get Trump as president we can’t let him have Republican Congress to go with his Republican Supreme Court.
Fearmongering b.s.
Who said he’d never lift a finger for Med4All? Credit Card Joe.
Who’s currently funding and running cover for the worst genocide since WW2 ended? Credit Card Joe.
Who’s been a sociopathic anti-Putin Russophobe putting the lives of millions in Europe and West Asia at risk?
Whose admin is fomenting incredibly dangerous hostility towards China in Taiwan and the South China Sea thereby putting all of Asia at risk?
Trumpenstein is probably just as bad as Biden but so what?
We’re living in a reckless and repugnant dying empire, the sooner it’s relegated to the dustbin of history, the better.
I cannot understand how there can be anyone left alive in Gaza. Why hasn’t there been an epidemic of something like cholera? It is borne via unsanitary water and kills within hours of the first symptoms. This is why east Asian homes have such strict rules about contamination. No shoes in the house. Even shopping bags are not allowed to touch the floor or ground. Restaurants have special containers for them.
Maybe they have had previous vaccinations or have become immune over the years due to the restrictions imposed by their oppressors. Either way Patrick, it’s a miracle really:
Xxxx://www.cdc.gov/cholera/about/index.html
So the real question you pose is what can we do to break our system of government, the system which has proved implacable in its pursuit of evil with its ability to distract us with political theater around far more modest issues that our two cooperating major parties guarantee will not be solved because they have convinced us that in various combinations they matter more than war and genocide.
If we are truly a democracy we can break it at the ballot box, refusing to be tricked into supporting either of them by pretensions of being ‘a lesser evil’ because neither of them is. It’s not a matter of ideology because neither of them has any beyond the one of keeping us impotent – and our main media find it in the interests of their owners to cooperate with them in this opportunistic theater.
If we find the prospect of throwing them out and tearing down all that distracting theater to which we have become so accustomed too uncomfortable, then we’re the ones to blame for it. That’s what democracy is. Sure other parties may have unfamiliar ideologies that they tout but as long as in combination they pursue good policies we can support them.