Gaza 🪶 A Question Of Witness And Of The Heart

Mark Gray ✍ I almost gave up on this article.

What was the point, given the enormous spreading bloodstain, erupting from Israel’s unrelenting onslaught on Gaza, seeping across West Asia? (‘The Middle East’ in deeply engrained Western colonial terminology.) What was the point in the face of conspicuous genocide complicity across Europe? What was the point, confronted by the United States’ iron-clad, bipartisan support for Israel, enabling and abetting its genocidal fury?

I didn’t give up, though. I finished the article as a small act of solidarity with all those who have awakened to protest the appalling slaughter and accompanying de-contextualized narrative, especially young people whose activism has put their future at risk, and Jewish people who see that what is being done in their name is grotesquely at odds with the good Judaism has to offer the world in its search for justice.

Primarily, I finished it as an act of witness to what is happening in Gaza at this moment of Kairos and conscience, in conformity with what Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel identifies as ‘the eternal struggle of an ethical gaze.’ This gaze must involve the heart also: how we respond to an inhumanity, which is being normalized against a beleaguered, battered, brutalized people.

A multitude of ways has been found to frame the dreadful and disproportionate violence unleashed against Gaza, exemplified in the destruction of schools, hospitals, sewage works, universities, bakeries, museums, water plants, mosques, churches, even cemeteries: every sinew of civilized life.

Gaza has been subjected to more destructive force than across Ukraine in its war with Russia. This small, densely populated strip of land has suffered the equivalent of at least two atomic bombs. The Lancet medical journal estimates that the true Palestinian death toll is reaching towards a minimum of 200,000. Yaakov Garb, a professor at Ben Gurion University, has concluded on the basis of Israeli military data that more than 350,000 Palestinians are missing, many certainly dead. Far more children have been killed than in every conflict around the world since 2019 combined.

The stream of shocking videos and stories keeps rising, a flood of depravity: mass graves; dogs feeding on dead bodies; drones targeting toddlers, shooting them through the head or heart; emaciated children, hunger gnawing at their guts; Palestinian medics forced at gunpoint by Israeli troops to abandon premature babies in al-Nasr Hospital . . . when the medics return, the babies are dead, their bodies decomposing.

My friend, Columbia Theological Seminary graduate, Rev Dr Becca Young, has been teaching Palestinian children via Zoom in Gaza and the West Bank. She found an openly posted video of the Beit Hanoun school where she volunteered being obliterated. Israeli soldiers roared their approval. She wept. In cosmopolitan Israel, sweaty night-clubbers cavort to a song about burning Palestinian villages. In moon-scape Gaza, Israeli warriors put on the underwear of Palestinian women, whose wrecked homes they ransack. A society unhinged, its moral compass smashed. A child hasn’t spoken or eaten in days. When a psychologist finally gets him to talk, he asks a question that stops her cold: ‘Everyone says my friend went to heaven, but I didn’t see his head. How can he go to heaven without his head?’ This is Gaza today.

None of it exists in a vacuum, disconnected from history, policies and attitudes.

My grandmother was Jewish. This was only a family curiosity until 2005. I was in Palestine-Israel learning about grass-roots Palestinian development and Israeli solidarity in the struggle for justice. I mentioned my grandmother to an Israeli human rights activist. Interested, he observed that I could be designated Jewish, with the right of ‘return’ to a land I had never previously been, had no ties to, and have not set foot in since. I would gain privileges and access which Palestinians, who had roots going back generations, had been stripped of and systematically blocked from ever getting back.

That this intersection of the personal and political was remotely possible was vertiginous and disturbing, especially in light of a poignantly charged story I heard from Nazer Halteh, a wonderfully animated and determined woman working with the YWCA to give Palestinian children and young people the best skills possible to make their way in a cruelly discriminatory system.

Her father-in-law had recently died, his mind ravaged by dementia. As a young man, his entire family had been driven off their farm at the foundation of the Israeli state, forced to live as refugees in their own country. To his last breath, when he remembered nothing else, he kept talking about how he wanted to go home, back to where he had been born and grown up, close to historic Jaffa, now swallowed by Tel Aviv.

This is emblematic of the legacy and live significance of the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, leaving families with keys to homes from which they had been swept like the detritus of history: a weeping wound, inflamed, untended since.

From a Western perspective, the creation of the state of Israel was a response to the chimneys of the holocaust. This arrangement, however, was never morally watertight, and more and more people increasingly understand its inadequacy and injustice. Essentially, Eurocentric North Atlantic countries absolved themselves from centuries of deep-seated antisemitism at the expense of Palestinian rights, while inserting a settler-colonial ally in a volatile region. As Edward Said put it, Palestinians have been victimized by the victims.

Remember though, Zionism was a form of 19th century nationalism, which from its origins aimed at colonizing and Judaizing all of historic Palestine. Key Zionists envisioned the expulsion of the Palestinians long before WW2, as attested by Ilan Pappé, one of the ‘New Historians’ in Israel, who have debunked a distorted Zionist narrative.

Little wonder Rashid Khalidi entitled one of his books The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Little wonder either that, since the Nakba, Israel has obdurately defied the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as international law guarantees. As a parallel strategic policy, it has also relentlessly pursued the partition of Palestine, until it now resembles a fragmented scattering of Bantustans. Here’s the reality: Israel is an ethno-nationalist apartheid state. Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela knew this in their bones.

I wish I had time to introduce you to more of the people I met: Ahmed Sourani, giving each of his children seeds at the age of five to teach them that growing anything – including peace – takes time and patience; Suliman Abu Allah, living in the shadow of a massive illegal Israeli settlement, under constant military surveillance, fenced in and cut off from his land by a Jewish only road; Abu Said Natat, making his farm in Gaza flourish again following the Israeli occupation that had made it a wasteland; Raji Sourani, striving for human rights for decades, still alive after Israeli warplanes destroyed his offices, then his home in the current carnage. All had experienced the ritual humiliation engrained in how Israeli society treats Palestinians.

In Palestine, I encountered some of the most hospitable, generous, hopeful people I have met anywhere, all rooted in the related concepts of Sumud and Palestinianity: steadfastness, perseverance and resilience as the cultural, ideological and political foundation of resistance to occupation and oppression.

Encountering Palestinians exposed the depth of my unconscious anti-Palestinian prejudice, based on historical ignorance, old Leon Uris novels and standard Israeli myths. I left with a different view. By that stage of my life, I had been many places in the world, several marked by tension, division and violence, not least my home place, Northern Ireland. In Israel I felt that one community was trying to eliminate the other: through its policies, the Israeli state appeared determined to erase Palestinians. I never shared this impression with anyone: how can you say that sort of thing?

We are now at an apocalyptic point, which is both revelatory and terrifying.

It reveals that the Palestinian people, rather than any ideology or organization, is the problem for Israelis, 82% of whom support the annihilation of Gaza. More starkly than ever before, it reveals the latent genocide lurking in Zionism when Palestinians refuse to accept that their dehumanized role is to ‘scuttle around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle,’ as General Rafael Eitan described it back in 1983. It reveals the staggering moral vacuity of the global system constructed by the West, now crumbling under the weight of its own hypocrisy. It reveals that the horror in Gaza emerges from the same racist imperial mindset that drove the slave trade, massacred indigenous people, oversaw colonial famines.

For the terrifying – from which there is a fathomless pool to draw – listen to Ghassan Abu-Sittah, plastic surgeon and founder of the Conflict Medicine Program at the American University of Beirut:

I think we’re beyond words … we’re into the final solution where you intentionally create a famine while you’re killing people … I think the Israelis have decided that expulsion is not going to happen … people need to be killed where they are.

It is a bleak assessment.

The people of Gaza are at the heart of darkness, in all its dystopian horror. But the way of tears through the blood of the slaughtered – perhaps – may not end where we dread. A junction has been reached. One direction allows Israel and its backers to continue driving Palestinians to extermination. The other leads to the establishment of a binational, authentically democratic, egalitarian state: equality in dignity and respect; equality in the right of return for refugees; equality in all things as the prerequisite for Palestinians and Israelis to live together. Jeff Halper, an American-Israeli sociologist, has addressed how it could work in his book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State.

Some will dismiss and deride this as utopian. But it recognizes that in the Nakba, Israel rendered its own catastrophe inevitable. It articulates a more profoundly hope oriented reality than the alternative, which will only deepen Israel’s crisis of legitimacy, accentuate its status as a pariah state and accelerate its descent into psychopathic violence. Some might clutch at the straw of resuscitating the corpse of the two state solution. But this would only replicate multiple Gaza scenarios across the splinters of remaining historic Palestine, dominated and unfree, permanently threatened by rolling genocide. There is no Zionism with a human face. Neither is there any way to be pro-Israel and anti-Zionist.

Ordinary people around the world have seen the multi-faceted barbarity of the live-streamed genocide, and have written, marched, protested. Now, faced with the depravity of Israeli troops being ordered to kill starving, unarmed civilians attempting to get food for their families – one returning soldier acknowledged he felt like a Nazi treating the Jews – it’s time to take things to a different level. With Western governments prioritizing closing down Palestinian solidarity rather than ending the genocide, it’s time to show that ordinary people are not peripheral actors in history but its authors.

The challenge is massive. But international levers are available to end the Gaza atrocity. Taking a cue from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the Global March to Gaza, it’s time to mobilize, using all the skills available from every aspect of civil society around the world, to pressurize the powers that be to: (1) end the slaughter and starvation by getting a peace-keeping and emergency relief mission into Gaza under the UN General Assembly ‘Uniting for Peace’ Resolution 377 (V); (2) make West Asia a nuclear free zone to ensure Israel never has the chance to deploy its Samson option; (3) pursue through the courts all those involved in genocide and war crimes to hold them to account.

It’s time to bear witness to children devoured by fire and famine: the traumatized, targeted, shot, bombed, amputated – often without anaesthetic – children and people of Gaza. It’s time to play our tiny part in Tikkun Olam – mending the world: pursuing without ceasing the demands of conscience and heart for the good of Gaza and wider Palestine until, with everyone sitting under their own vine and fig tree, the tear is wiped from every eye. And no one will terrorize them or make them afraid anymore.

⏩Mark Gray is a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He holds an M.Div. From Columbia Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from Queen's University, Belfast. A former mission worker to Malawi, he has also served congregations in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.