Response Initiative to the screening of the film: Gaza Drama “The Voice of Hind Rajab” by Muriel Tillinghast.
Almost 1000 days ago, the State of Israel pivoted and made a crushing response to what is understood as a collaborative attack by Hamas and kindred organizations on its territory and its people. Secured by greater and more advanced firepower at every level, Israel’s response was generally accepted at first as a righteous and furious response to the attack.
Publicly, Israel was in protective mode, a defensive posture militarily. In relatively short order, however, the State said that its objective was not only military retaliation, but the vanquishing of any organized opposition to its existence. This comes to the fore because clearly Israel militarily has put Hamas on the run or on the ropes. But it cannot eliminate the ideas which occupations and wars generate: resentment, desire for retaliation, the slow burn of hate resulting from layered injustices.
This conundrum, by the way, is shared with Jews and Non-Jews who are not antisemitic, but who have issues with what is the perceived sealed duality of the Zionist ideological justification for a Jewish state versus the desire to provide a peaceful homeland for people who inhabit the region. It is neither simple nor impossible to manage change if there is a will to do so.
All who recognize universal humanity are aghast at what is happening in Palestine, period. The war has long since turned on ordinary people, with some 75,000 assumed dead and the bodies of many thousands lying under the rubble or blown to bits, given the kind of assaults that are the daily grind of this war.
There are simultaneously other terror systems in place for those who fall into the hands of the Israeli military on maneuvers. The prisons and ongoing executions are a testament to these ancillary issues. Others have long questioned the daily harassment and control issues relative to the Palestinians in the non-war area. In the long run, these are not answers, but cancers to the body politic.
All wars are horrors, to be sure, but it is particularly aggravating in that Israel, formed by many who managed to escape the horrors of WWII, would at this turn of history be the perpetrators of many of the same tactics against their adversaries. We cannot accept this at any level. It is heinous, egregious, racist, and sadistic. It is painful that we would now level these words at a country that many of us strove for and had valued among the better nations of the world.
