by W.D. Ehrhart
No thoughtful person could possibly ever justify or condone what Hamas did in southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. But the level of destruction, misery, death, and inhumanity inflicted upon Gaza and the people of Palestine in the 18 months since then just plain beggars the imagination.
According to the French ambassador to the United Nations, 80 percent of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed. Every hospital in Gaza has been damaged, and not one is fully functional. Half of them are closed. Famine is widespread, and the entire civilian population has been displaced multiple times.
Humanitarian assistance has been difficult or impossible to deliver, and over 300 humanitarian aid workers have been killed. As of January, the British Broadcasting Corporation reports that 92 percent of all civilian housing has been destroyed. Water and sanitation facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Schools have ceased to function; those that have not been destroyed have become refugee collection points.
Though the UN says that at least a million Palestinian children are in need of mental health support, Save the Children reports that all six of its community mental health centers are closed, along with the only inpatient psychiatric hospital.
India’s NDTV reports that as of January, 68 percent of Palestinian farmland has been rendered unusable, along with 88 percent of irrigation systems, orchards, farm machinery, and barns.
Worst of all, some 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in the past 18 months, including 13,300 children. Another 97,000 have been wounded. And the psychological damage to hundreds of thousands is incalculable.
All this in retaliation for the October 7th attack that killed 1200 Israelis, including 329 soldiers and 58 police officers, along with the 251 hostages Hamas kidnapped, some of whom have died in captivity.
As I said, and I meant it and mean it, nothing good can be said about what Hamas did that day. The history of Palestine and Israel is long and complicated and bitter, and I am not going to try to argue who is right and who is wrong.
But anyone with an ounce of objectivity need only look at the incredibly grotesque imbalance between what Hamas did that day and what Israel has been doing ever since to conclude that the disproportionate response of the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces is simply vindictive revenge. And revenge inflicted mostly not on the people who attacked Israel, but on hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders who just happen to have been born in the wrong place.
What I am saying here is not antisemitism. I don’t care what you say or what you think. Opposing the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli government, and the IDF is not antisemitism. Opposing the mass destruction of a people and a land in response to the unjustifiable and murderous actions of a small proportion of that population is not antisemitism. Decrying the suffering, misery, and pain inflicted on the people of Palestine is not antisemitism. Supporting the humanity, the dignity, and the right to live in peace for Palestinians (or any other group, for that matter, be they Ukrainians or Uighurs or Rohingyas) is not antisemitism.
To insist that unless I wholeheartedly and uncritically support the policies and actions of the government of Israel, I am antisemitic is simply a form of bullying, an attempt to silence me by intimidation.
I am not going to try to argue that some of my best friends are Jewish, though many of them are. I am not going to argue that many of my Jewish friends are appalled by what the Israeli government and the IDF have been doing in the Occupied Territories and Gaza, though many of them are. I am not even going to argue that I’ve been enjoying watching Steve Lang playing Samuel in “The House of David,” though I am.
But I am going to argue that opposing the policies of the Israeli government does not mean I hate Jews. Opposing the policies of the Israeli government does not mean I think the state of Israel has no right to exist. Opposing the policies of the Israeli government simply means I don’t approve of what the Israeli government is doing in and to Gaza and the West Bank.
I don’t approve of the policies of the U.S. government, certainly not since January 20th, but that doesn’t mean I hate Americans or think the United States has no right to exist. Opposing a government is simply not the equivalent of opposing a nation or a people or a religion. It’s not. Period.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.