Israel, Gaza and our powerless gaze

What comes after the blood dries on the killing fields

Hour after hour I am a powerless witness to the incomprehensible horror, fruitlessly watching the carnage, mesmerized, frozen, safe in my home. I am ashamed of my species’ barbarity, ashamed of my fascination, consumed with sorrow and gratitude I am so distant from death’s indiscriminate scythe.

I lamented to my wife Ellen, “I’m powerless to stop watching.”

“You have the power. It’s in your hand. Turn it off.”

Gaping at the horror, non-stop, is the least I can do.

The brutal, murderous and morally just American Civil War against the evil southern slave holding states ceased in 1865 after the treasonous Confederacy had been reduced to rubble and their combatants annihilated. More than 600,000 Americans were butchered by their fellow Americans. In the aftermath of that uncivil war President Lincoln sought to “bind up the nation's wounds” in hopes of bringing “a just and lasting peace among ourselves”, a romantic American vision, the right answer at the time, rooted in naive hope, encouraging the victors and survivors of carnage to adopt a spirit of “malice toward none with charity for all.”

Good luck with that.

More than one hundred years, and- what? Three? Four generations later?- our Civil War, long believed to be resolved, remains an open wound.

Today in 2023 we saw that malignant malice, alive and well, in the form of the Confederate flag paraded proudly through the halls of our hallowed Capitol by Trump’s army of treasonous Insurrectionists in 2020.

Can we demand others move on, forget and heal when we have not?

In the aftermath of bloody wars the seeds of future wars take root, among the children of the dead, animated by the thirst for blood vengeance, a thirst that has cursed the orphans of war since the beginning of time.

The Hellfire of blood vengeance, easily ignited by treacherous violence, always becomes politically unstoppable, blinding us in the moment to considering the aftermath of the wars we inevitably are compelled to unleash on each other.

Hamas, seeking to wipe Israel from the earth, chose heinous barbarity and martyrdom as their “strategy” to ignite blood vengeance across the region, a sickening act of madness which can only lead to a tsunami of rage inflamed blood vengeance.

And months, or years from now, if the madness of this war does not spawn a global war of mass annihilation between us all, and a smoldering Gaza and a wary eternally entangled Israel remain, side by side, what then?

When we invaded Iraq on false premises 20-years ago, we stupidly believed we could invade a nation we were too sloth to educate ourselves about, believing we, with our might , our shock and awe, could change their brutal and vile regime and bring about a dreamlike unity in that region. We were not greeted with flowers as promised by our leaders.

It is as if our feckless policymakers, blinded by their politically-driven thirst for blood vengeance over 9/11, had never read a history of the region.

We foolishly chose to step into a snake pit of ancient vendettas and we ended up unleashing a predictable hornet’s nest of inter-tribal blood vengeance.

Of course nations have a right to defend themselves against terrorists. War is often a nation’s answer to the terrorist and the question for us all is how does one make war on terrorists without spawning more terrorists?

I have no answer.

It took two atomic bombs to subjugate Japan’s fanaticism. It took a near genocide of the German people to crush the Nazi soul.

The entire digitally connected planet witnessed the Hamas terror, the merciless killing of hundreds of men, women and children. Babies decapitated. Hostages taken. Families shredded. Children killed, crushed, broken and maimed.

How many generations must pass away before the demons of blood vengeance are exorcised?

Will the world ever see a “just and lasting peace” in this region in the aftermath of this war? Half the people in Gaza are under 18-years of age. All of them must be riddled with P.T.S.D. from the incessant bombing and visions of the dead and dying. When those 18-year olds are old men and women, with grey hair, will they have renounced vengeance or will they carry it with them in their broken hearts to the grave? When the Israelis who survived Hamas’ rampage are old men and women will they have renounced vengeance?

When? In our lifetime? In three generations? In seven?

Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas will require the ground invasion and annihilation of Gaza.

After the annihilation Israeli forces will have to occupy a place they pounded into the stone age, a desolate land of utter ruin with a population of 2-million bitter, hostile survivors. Tens of thousands caught up in the indiscriminate flame thrower rage of this war will be left dead, wounded, starving, homeless and impoverished. The UN claims 400,000 are now utterly homeless.

Israel will have to create, fund, man and manage a strict police state in order to weed out any remaining members of Hamas.

Who will govern the ruin? Israel? An alliance of Arab states? In Gaza there are no other political players to fill the vacuum. I see no modern day General MacArthur on the horizon to shepherd a modern democratic state into existence as the victorious Allies did for defeated Japan.

The scale of the humanitarian crisis will demand a Marshall Plan to rebuild Gaza, to feed, house, and care for the living and to provide a future worth living for, with malice towards none. Charity towards all.

I am resigned to the grim truth. The thirst for blood vengeance, humanity’s ancient curse will persist. Over 2,500 years ago it was a world weary Plato who observed “only the dead have seen the end of war.”

After the Allied nations of the West blasted Germany back into its stone age, we, along with the Brits and the French become occupiers for a decade. And we struggled to weed out the surviving Nazi elements with a program called denazification. Within a year, distracted by the looming Cold War, America lost interest. As a result too many Nazis escaped justice. And too many were welcomed here because of their war-making expertise.

When I visited a museum in Munich devoted to explaining the rise of the Nazis in Germany I was captivated by the final exhibit, a large screen featuring looping footage of the magnificent German city of Munich bombed into rubble by Allied forces. Utter and complete destruction. I was ashamed of how satisfying I found watching that grainy film after hours of walking through the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I thought.

Sic Semper Tyrannis, I thought.

Did we erase the cancer of Nazism from our world in 1945? Consider first, the terrible price the West paid to liberate Europe from its madness beginning with the 73,000 human beings who perished at the Battle of Normandy. Yet the madness persists. In 2017, American Nazis, despicable, ignorant, treasonous, and nursing their ethos of blood vengeance, marched in a torchlight parade in Charlottesville chanting “You will not replace us”. Today in 2023, the hate survives here, in my home state, where there are more than thirty-nine hate groups thriving, with many embracing Nazi ideologies.

Good luck eliminating the ideology of Hamas.

The Palestinians reside in two areas. Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, a corrupt, fanatical governing body that rejects coexistence and to the east, The West Bank, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt, pragmatic governing body that rejects the jihadist strategies of Hamas.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a corrupt power hungry opportunist, adopted a political strategy of using the fanatical Hamas party in Gaza as a reason to reject working towards a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority. This “triangulation” freed Netanyahu to approved insane settlements among the Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank by 450,000 self-righteous Jews who consider themselves “Pioneers”.

Some of my friends have turned away from viewing the horror of this war. I cannot turn away as the contagion of blood vengeance grows.

Powerless, I watch the news crawl numbering the casualties of war.

Powerless, I donate to Doctors Without Borders.

Powerless, I accept I am an ignorant, distant observer with no answers, only profound sorrow.

Powerless, I slip into my comfortable, safe bed, knowing the sun will be rising on the other side of the world over relentless suffering, with the vengeful giving little thought to the future. In the dark I recall the words of a modern day American martyr slain by the persistent demons of our centuries old Civil War, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

Doctors without Borders