What Gaza Needs Now Is Mercy
A grim historical lesson taught by Thucydides, who wrote on the Peloponnesian War more than two millennia ago, is that the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must. Historically, the Jewish people have often been weak. Weak in the sense they had no homeland. They had no army. They were, in a word, vulnerable.
Compounding this vulnerability was prejudice. People who are vilified, who are dismissed as untrustworthy, who are defined as “other,” even as “human animals,” are especially vulnerable to the strong because the vilified rarely attract staunch champions or even sympathetic helpers.
Today, the Jewish people remember and commemorate those who helped them, who stood for justice, who were “righteous gentiles,” at places like Yad Vashem.
There’s a famous saying, the gist of which is that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. During the Holocaust, far too many people did nothing when confronted by the evils of Nazism, and millions died as a result.
Today, the Jewish people are no longer weak. In Israel they have a homeland protected by powerful armed forces. They have staunch allies, including the world’s premier “superpower,” along with nuclear weapons, perhaps 200 of them, enough to wipe out the nations and peoples in their immediate vicinity.
Again, Israel today is strong. Thus it faces the ethical dilemma of the strong: the ability to kill on a mass scale, an ability too easily justified in the name of “defense.” Will Israel illustrate Thucydides’ maxim of the strong doing what they will and the weak—in this case, the Palestinians—suffering as they must?
The hardline Israeli government appears to see mass violence, mass death, and mass expulsion as the only solution in Gaza.
History is replete with examples of the strong doing what they will while the weak suffer. Yet Israel is exercising overwhelming power against weak and vulnerable people in ways well known to Jews who’ve suffered greatly themselves in a long and tortured past.
Palestinians in Gaza are not collectively guilty of crimes committed by Hamas. They are an entrapped and desperate people. What is to become of them?
Israel knows the value of righteousness, of justice for all, of an abiding love for all life, as reflected in the moral exemplars honored at Yad Vashem.
What Israel needs now is moral heroism. What Gaza needs now is mercy.
Perhaps if George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell and Cheney had been prosecuted and convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq 20 years ago, a message would have been sent to other like-minded criminals, like Netanyahu, that no one is above the law and leaders who engage in such illegal actions will be held accountable. When there is no accountability, tyranny reigns.
Each new day since this assault began my heart has sunk further wondering about the total lack of humanity in Western Europe and in the US - I don't want to use the word America because apparently the country that I once knew as America no longer exists. Today it is full of people who either have no interest in the rest of the world and simply go about their lives ignoring the wholesale murder of other people, or else cheering it on. Yes Bill, you named some of the recent ones Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the names go back well over 100 years as we list the peoples we have demolished or impoverished, always telling our children that we did it for their good. There seems to be no person in our government who will speak out loudly against what is happening, certainly not our president or members of his cabinet, members of the Pentagon or people in Congress, our police and legal system, and lord knows not in the Supreme Court. It apparently doesn't matter which political party you belong to; neither one is planning to do a damn thing about any of it except maybe a mild "tut tut" or two. Too many state legislatures along with congress are passing laws preventing protests, and trying to jail people who tell the truth. WW III is high on the agenda and our leaders love it.
Our children, watch in horror and wonder if there will be a world for them - and the so- called adults don't care enough to stop the slaughter.