Notes on the Anniversary of October 7th
Late because I was trying to organize my thoughts.
Many Americans, including many Palestinian supporters, have marked October 7th, 2024 as the one year anniversary of the Gaza Genocide. The Palestinian Genocide has been ongoing for decades prior to October 7th, 2023 so this year does not mark the one year anniversary. Hamas is being blamed for starting this war, which is not a war. It is a genocide. The Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no tanks, no heavy artillery and some very inaccurate rockets and small arms. They’ve cobbled together what arms they have to defend themselves from constant Israeli aggression in spite of a near total .
Much is made of Israel’s right to defend itself, which it actually doesn’t have under international humanitarian law. Designated as an occupying force since it took Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights from Egypt, Syria and the Palestinians in a war in 1967 that even some of their own generals and all of the US intelligence community said was unnecessary. Under International Humanitarian Law Israel, as an occupying force has the responsibility to defend the civilians under their occupation. Instead, they have murdered tens of thousands, imprisoned tens of thousands and inflicted shortages of food, medicine and fuel on the Gaza Strip.
Hamas has, under the same international humanitarian law, the right to use violence to resist the occupation. I don’t ever condone the deliberate murder of civilians and understanding why Hamas did what it did is not condoning. They were pushed into the attack by decades of murder and abuse by the Israelis and the total apathy of the international community who obviously values Israeli lives more than Palestinian lives. By taking Israeli lives it forced the international community to turn its attention to Palestine. The subsequent ramping up of the genocide against the Palestinians has turned the tide of world opinion against Israel and the attack by Hamas on Israel was a strategic and tactical success. The resultant genocide was illegal and unjustified.
Israel was founded by terrorists. That is not my opinion. They were designated terrorists by the British government and they repeatedly attacked civilian targets like busy streets and markets. The Likud party which has ruled Israel for most of my lifetime was co-founded by Menachem Begin a founder of the terrorist organization Irgun. The original sin of the Zionist state, known by Palestinians as the Nakba was the forceful removal of 750,000 Palestinians and the murder of approximately six thousand. This original sin has been followed by the periodic killing of thousands more, the imprisonment of tens of thousands and rape and torture of prisoners. The crimes of Israel far outweigh the crimes of Hamas and their start preceded the formation of Hamas by decades. This isn’t even close. Any attempt to make the crimes of Hamas comparable to the crimes of Israel is ridiculous on its face. Some of this may sound repetitive and it is but I offer it again to give the background to my feelings on October 7th.
The attack on Gaza post October 7th, followed a long-developed plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and actually had very little to do with the Palestinian attack or the hostages. The Hamas attack on October 7th gave them the excuse to carry out their long planned operation. Israel’s indifference to the fate of the hostages was made abundantly clear by the indiscriminate bombing campaign that has gone on since and that has killed many of the hostages. The extraordinary number of civilian casualties is being cause by the enormous number of munitions targeted on civilian targets like medical facilities, schools, mosques, etc. The aim is not to eradicate Hamas but to make Gaza uninhabitable, as several high-ranking Israeli officials have stated publicly. The attack on Israel, no doubt killed Israeli civilians and that is a tragedy. Innocent civilians on both sides are precious. That said, Israel originally claimed 1,400 casualties, later revised down to 1,200. At least 300 of them were IDF members, many more were armed Kibbutz members and several hundred more were killed by the IDF under the Hannibal Directive. We will never know the true number because Israel destroyed evidence before an impartial investigation could take place. This attack was used for justification to kill over 100,000 Palestinian civilians and the number could very well be much higher.
Which brings me to my feelings on the anniversary. October the 7th was not the beginning but an acceleration of the genocide that has been going on since the state of Israel was formed. It was formed as an Israeli supremacist ethno-state and has developed into an apartheid state. Non-Jews and even Jews of color are routinely discriminated against inside of Israel and Palestinians are routinely murdered in the occupied territories. Israel has expanded its murderous rampage into Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen. Including the terrorist pager attack in Lebanon, the attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria, and attacks on Iran’s capital city of Tehran. As has been true since 1947, Israel has been the aggressor and has repeatedly ignored norms of international conduct and laws in its aggressive campaign to take over all of historic Palestine.
In 1937, more than a decade before the formation of the state of Israel, David Ben Gurion, who would become the Zionist State’s first prime minister stated, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” In their declaration of independence, they removed a paragraph referring to the borders set out by the UN partition plan and referred to the formation of Eretz Israel, a biblical term that refers to borders far beyond the UN mandate. This was the plan all along and succeeding governments have not deviated from that plan.
Every day since the start of the acceleration, my heart has been devastated by the enormous number of civilians killed by the IDF. The official number has stood at 40,000 for months now and that’s not because the killing has stopped. American doctors who have returned to the states estimate the true number to be over 130,000 and the British Medical Journal The Lancet has estimated the true number to be over 180,000. They came to this number by trying to estimate the bodies still trapped under the rubble, the number of Gazans who died from treatable wounds because Israel has destroyed all medical infrastructure, the number who died from treatable diseases for the same reason, the number who died from diseases caused by lack of clean water because Israel has destroyed water infrastructure and the number who will die from the Israeli imposed famine. One of the most pernicious lies spread by Israeli propagandists is that Hamas is deliberately starving children. The truth is that children, because they are not yet fully developed will feel the effects of famine sooner than adults and even die sooner.
The death of Palestinian children has haunted my every waking moment. When I look at my family I can’t help but think of whole Palestinian families wiped out. Their lineage ended because of genocide. Especially when I look at my son, I see the faces of Palestinian children. I’m not a great artist but the painting at the beginning of this essay is the one I’m most proud of because it represents the tens of thousands of innocents slaughtered by the Zionist entity. As I said, not a day goes by that my heart doesn’t break.
Although the deaths of Palestinians is the thing weighing most heavily on my mind there are other deaths that I have been forced to face in the year since the most current acceleration started. One is the death of the idea that the US is a force for good in the world. That idea had been slowly eroding since I retired from the military in 2005 and was permanently put to rest by our full support of the Israeli’s genocide. This is just a tip of the iceberg of the US atrocities all over the world. The US is responsible for the death of millions and the displacement and suffering of millions more people all over the world since the end of WWII. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize this once you pull off the blinders of western propaganda.
In the early days of the trump administration, I was at a demonstration talking to a member of my church and decrying the fact that Donald Trump was beginning to resemble Hitler and he assured me that such comparisons were premature. He was right and little did I know at that time that it would be the democrats who would emulate Hitler’s greatest crime. In a little over seventy years the democrats went from hanging genocidaires during the Truman administration to aiding and abetting them under the current administration. The phrase “Never Again,” was amended to “Never again unless it’s our Zionist allies in Palestine killing Palestinians.”
The idea that our people would never support another Hitler has vanished, DOA. Our populace is almost cleanly split, one half supporting the administration who is currently committing genocide, whose candidate vows to continue her predecessors policies if she is elected and the other half is supporting a candidate who tried to overthrow our government and vows to keep up the genocidal policies. The fact that this is all we have to choose from screams loudly of the debilitated state of our so-called democracy. The fact that I and many like me who won’t support either of these monsters are vilified for not falling in line to save this country from fascism is distressing because so many people don’t realize that fascism has already come to America. If you are a democrat and do not believe that fascism is bipartisan, just take a close look at the places where the most brutal crackdown on pro-Palestinian college protesters took place, Los Angeles and New York City, both cities with democratic mayors and states with democratic governors.
Fascism is defined by Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as: a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized government headed by an autocratic, dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition. The demonization of immigrants is bipartisan. The cages used by the trump administration were built by the Obama administration and the Harris campaign has vowed tougher immigration policies as if immigrants are the cause of our problems. Our agricultural system would collapse without those immigrants. The increasing militarization of local law enforcement who often brutalize and murder citizens extrajudicially and are rarely held to account is the most obvious sign of the fascism already present in our country. Ironically more and more of our local law enforcement agencies receive training from the IDF and receive excess military equipment from our government. The attempt to make certain forms of protest like the BDS movement illegal and the attempt to outlaw certain forms of speech as antisemitic, such as the word Zionist or the phrase “From the river to the Sea,” make it plain that the only freedom to debate we have is what the government allows within a narrow constraint to paraphrase Noam Chomsky. This narrow allowable discourse doesn’t threaten the core foundation of empire and gives its subjects the illusion of freedom. Whenever steps out of that narrowly defined allowable discourse the retribution is swift and harsh. The case of Steven Donziger is another huge example of fascism. He was jailed on trumped up charges for contempt of court and was sued under the RICO statute basically for winning a judgement against Chevron for environmental damage and health problems cause by their operations in Ecuador. He was disbarred by the state of New York for the court judgement resulting from Chevron’s action which civil rights organizations called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP). Any litigation that threatens the power of the corporate world can be attacked by such lawsuits by corporations that have very deep pockets in an attempt to silence them or bankrupt them by astronomical legal fees. This is only one example of the subjugation of our legal system that is one of the basic tenets of the fascists running our country. The Obama and the Biden administration made no effort to repeal some of the worse policies of Bush and trump administrations. The slide into fascism is a bipartisan effort. The persecution of journalists like Julian Assange took place under both parties. The persecution of whistle blowers in spite of laws supposed to protect them has also occurred under bother parties and increasingly laws and the judicial system have been used to increasingly consolidate power in the hands of the few who are not elected officials. Laws are written by the entities that are supposedly regulated by them and leave average citizens no avenue for the redress of grievances. In many cases state and national legislative bodies have made bipartisan efforts to curtail civil rights.
The international rule of law has often been impotent in the face of rogue countries who didn’t care to follow norms and signatory treaties of international law and although the genocide in Gaza is not the first post WWII genocide to occur the final nail in that coffin has been hammered into place by the US and their constant shielding of Israel from the consequences of their genocidal actions that has been taking place for decades. The global south has seen the blatant hypocrisy of rules put in place by the west, “for thee but not for me.” Alliances are being made that will lead to further blood shed and suffering for millions all over the world as we edge perilously closer to WWIII with the nuclear powers, China and Russia. The powers that be, are already preparing for that likelihood by making high schools provide military recruiters with information about their students. Now there is a way to opt out but if war with China or Russia breaks out that option will quickly go away.
The rapidity with which the American public embraced genocide haunts me almost as much as the genocide itself. Millions of Americans believe voting for the party actively engaged in genocide is the lesser of two evils in spite of the fact that genocide is the greatest evil ever devised by modern humanity. The reasons for their support of the genocide are varied but they mostly breakdown into the two ideas that “I will support the genocide party in the presidential election because they might make my life a little easier.” Or “Donald trump will destroy our country.” The reason I want to address directly is that many voters are voting for the party of genocide because the believe that the democrats will protect a woman’s right to choose. The democrats are cynically using this very important and emotional issue as the cornerstone of their campaign strategy even though with the current makeup of the SCOTUS there’s really nothing they can do about it. The issue is decided for the next 20-30 years at the national level barring any catastrophes to the court members. The only hope for proponents of abortion rights like myself is that the court keeps its promise to let the states decide and we work like hell to keep legislative majorities in states where abortion is still legal. I would also go as far as subsidizing women’s moves to states where it is still legal. At the national level, all you have to do to prevent a national abortion ban is keep a majority in one house of congress. You don’t have to vote for the Harris genocide ticket.
The normalization of genocide in the most powerful nuclear capable country in the world puts the whole world at risk. Now that the precedent has been set that the American public will accept genocide, the next genocide and there will be another genocide because the government has seen how easily the vast majority of Americans have accepted this one, will be worse and may actually involve some group that you care about. This normalization of genocide and rampant militarization of every part of our society scares me greatly for two reasons. My fifteen-year-old son will be of draft age in just a few years and if the democrats are allowed to provoke WWIII my son is Chinese and would be vulnerable to the xenophobic anger of large swaths of Americans or he will be drafted into another unnecessary war to die on some foreign battlefield far from the people who love him for corporate profits. The Harris campaign has exalted in the fact that the US has the most powerful military in the world and that scares me also
If you really want to improve life in this country get involved in nongovernmental organizations that promote mutual aid and respect. We can no longer depend on either fascist party to rescue us. I am genuinely afraid that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Help your neighbor. Help those less fortunate than you. Take care of each other.