By Jim Miles
I can see the photos: the faces of children haunted by chaos beyond their control; their faces of pain, the silent cries and screams of injuries and fear; parents’ faces, torn with grief and more silent cries of pain and injustice; blood washed across staircases and floors in hospitals, blood caked on faces of innocent people – clotted with the powder and grit of demolished concrete and plaster from homes, hospitals, and schools;
I can see the photos: neighbourhoods crumpled and flattened by thousands of bombs; craters where buildings and streets used to be; people, small by comparison to the deluge of destruction, digging with bare hands through the tangled rubble of steel and mortar; people, frozen in time, calling for help, beseeching the world, damning the world, nowhere to turn, no escape from the whistle and rumble of bombs and missiles;
I cannot hear that: nor the screams of the wounded, the cries of the injured, the cries for lost parents, lost children, lost lives; the cries of those trapped under the wreckage of their homes;
I cannot smell that: the sickly metallic sweet smell of blood; the acrid sulfurous smoke of explosions; the dustings of powder and chemicals drifting around the ruins; the heart and gut-wrenching smells of bodies decomposing under the rubble; the smoke of a small fire somehow scavenged to boil water for a meager meal of…some unknown provenance;
I cannot touch that: the heat, the cold, the grit, the twist of iron bars under calloused and bloody hands searching for victims; the warm damp of bloodied clothing and bandages.
…and I understand: this is not a war, but a genocide committed against an imprisoned people; a genocide that has endured slowly over many decades; an ethnic cleansing long understood by the perpetrators to be an underlying feature of their conquest; as long as the very origins of the concept of the settler state started over a century ago.
There is no morality in U.S. governance
I listen to the politicians: the members of the U.S. congress and their fawning obsequiousness towards Israel; the same coming from the EU, Britain, Canada and other members of the ‘western’ (and diminishing) world. I listen to news commentaries: knowing that “balance” and “fairness” do not apply in a situation where one side has vastly superior military power (although not the touted prowess of such), controls most of the media, and has its mystique inculcated into its own population: exceptionalism, freedom, indispensability ring hollow in a world of violence they themselves have created.
The United States, as the largest purveyor of violence in the world, could easily put a stop to all this. The feeble words and excuses of the U.S. government only emphasize how the politicians, the military-industrial-financial complex, and the corporate “persons” – all of whom reap large financial rewards for this carnage – do not want the savagery to end. The military corporations – Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northop Grumman, an almost endless list – and those supplying them, are providing as per President Biden a financial boost for the U.S. economy. Lives and deaths are not important; the dollar reigns supreme, both for profits and global hegemony.
A big if, a gigantic if: if the U.S. simply stopped sending military support to Israel, the bombs and missiles and tanks would soon become silent. So simple; so not going to happen.
The U.S. is the least moral country in the world today. It has created and facilitated more wars, more deaths, more damages, more humanitarian disasters than any other country. The U.S. sees everything as a win or lose situation, a zero sum game in which only they can be the winners, at all costs – the costs of millions of lives around the world. Now it is the costs of tens of thousands of lives in Gaza/Palestine, the costs of all civic functions, of hospitals, doctors, schools, teachers, bakeries, electrical and sewage systems, all to support the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
The future is unknown, but obviously major changes of some kind are in process, violently so. There are solutions, none of which the U.S. or Israel will even consider for a moment, until and unless some unforeseen event forces them to. As both are nuclear armed violent societies, the world needs to hope above all hopes for a peaceful resolution to current events, beyond a pause, beyond a ceasefire, well into the creation of a democratic state for all citizens, well into the creation of a global democracy where politicians and their militaries do not rule.
In the meantime sumud in the face of a genocidal threat has served along with the resistance to ethnic tyranny. May peace eventually prevail.
Jim Miles is a Canadian educationist
15 December 2023
Source: countercurrents.org