Living Long Enough to Become the Villains

The story of Israel and Palestine especially since October 7th 2023 has been one of the most horrifying, tragic, and devastating events in modern history. It is the cruelest of ironies, that is Israel in particular that has waged this barbaric, dehumanizing and Total War of extermination and genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank.

Since the very first days after October 7th, we at DSOT have been decrying these violent actions and calling for an immediate ceasefire and the releasing of the hostages. Time and again there have been opportunities for peace to be established, but Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders in the Israeli government have shown little interest in either rescuing the hostages or ending this conflict. Instead, all of the worst fears of DSOT and other critics of the Netanyahu and Israeli have come to pass.

Over the past two years, the world has watched in horror as Gaza has been leveled, its people displaced violently and starved. There has been no end to the devastating images pouring out of Gaza, despite the best efforts of the Israeli military to hide these actions by killing journalists in the region and preventing official news sources from getting images on the ground of the unfolding genocide.

We use the word genocide, and ethnic cleansing here specifically, as in recent days there has been a shift clearly among both citizens and scholars to finally recognize this crime against humanity for what it is.Prominent Jewish groups like J Street,Holocaust and genocide scholars all agree that this is in fact a genocidal campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people. In both Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government continues to push unrelentingly against even their own military advice, seemingly unconcerned that they have become the literal monsters their parents and grandparents once fled. These are dark times, and it is absolutely brutal to watch helplessly as this slaughter happens day after day it breaks the heart of anyone paying attention anyone with a soul doubly so for those Jews who have seen the light that could have been Israel and go out in this dark spiral of rage and violence and death. 

Unfortunately, our own leaders are just as callous and cruel. Instead of standing up for the oppressed, the Trump Regime has thrown its full support behind Israel, paying back Miriam Adelson’s millions in campaign donations. Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson visited an illegal settlement in the West Bank just last week, and Trump largely gives carte blanche to Israeli forces. For those who thought that it couldn't get worse any worse than Biden’s failure of leadership, the horror of the past six months showed the naivety of such a position. The Israelis now feel comfortable enough in the situation that they are now openly admitting their goal is the permanent occupation of the Gaza Strip.

Witnessing this genocide live, it feels impossible to know what to do, but it's clear that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. There is no way to go back to a pre-October 7th state, neither for the Israelis nor for American and international support. The world has seen too much for too long to simply forget. Even in the United States of Amnesia, we’ve seen major, perhaps irreversible shifts in attitudes, for instance, Democratic party members register single digit support of Israel’s actions! To drive the point home, in the most recent New York primary Zohran Mamdani proudly proclaimed his support for the Palestinian people and won not only convincingly, but with a plurality of Jewish voters. Some Democratic campaign contributions from the Israeli lobby, and DC beltway “conventional wisdom” still hold sway.

The day will come, and hopefully is fast approaching, when everyone will have been against this inexcusable horror, but with the situation of the Palestinian people as dire as it is, it may be too late. Stopping arms sales and monetary support for Israel and recognizing the Palestinian State is desperately needed, but the reality is at this point that simply watching doing nothing without taking active intervention is immoral. We not only need cut off American aid to Israel, but we need multilateral, direct action to intervene against Israel to stop this slaughter. If Never Again means anything at all, it means stopping this.

Israel cannot continue on as an apartheid state. It cannot continue on with this ethnic cleansing, and it cannot be allowed to fully annex the West Bank. Unfortunately, we are profoundly far from the even the lesser forms of sanctions, like cutting off funding, let alone active intervention. So we will be forced to witness more death and starvation, more irreversible harm and inter-generational trauma before the tides turn.

To speed up that process will take not just political organizing, but economic as well. So join us each Tuesday in growing solidarity as we call for the sanctioning of Israel, a stop to the violence, and cutting off the monetary support from the United States and with it our culpability in this madness. Don't shop on Tuesday.

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