By: Priscilla Ibrahim
On October 7th, 2023 Hamas launched a brutal attack against innocent civilians, killing over 1,200 Israelis and taking an estimated 200 people hostage.[i] Any person with a conscience is rightfully horrified by this atrocity. Every one of those individuals had a personality, dreams, flaws, and people that loved them. The Western media rightfully provided airtime for moving testimonials to these people’s lives. Israelis are not just political symbols but human beings. It must be said unequivocally that the Israeli lives lost were precious. The hostages’ lives are precious. Every life is precious. But then how horrified should we be by the estimated over 11,000 Palestinians, half of whom were children, killed by Israeli bombings?[ii] How outraged should we be at Israel cutting off food, water, medical supplies, and power to the over 2 million people of Gaza?[iii] How heartbroken should we feel watching videos of Palestinian children completely shell-shocked after being awakened to the bombing of their homes? Yet Western media and leaders appear to lack such empathy towards us Arabs. As an American, I’m deeply disturbed by our complete abandonment of our core values, like human rights and the rule of law. As an Egyptian, I’m devastated by the grotesque dehumanization of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. They express ‘concern’ about the risk of civilian casualties while asserting Israel’s right to defend itself. They tell the names and stories of Israeli victims, but Palestinians are only statistics. President Biden requested $14.3 billion in aid to Israel in addition to the $3.3 billion we already give annually.[iv] Gaza has only just received its first trickle of aid trucks.[v] The selective moral outrage is so stark one can only conclude that Palestinian and Arab lives are worth less than other lives. The systemic dehumanization of Palestinians and Arabs is justifying genocide. Three key lies are fueling this dehumanization.
1. The Violence Started on October 7th
Hamas is responsible for the terrorist attack that took place on October 7th. While it is unjustifiable, it can’t be removed from the context of a 75-year-long occupation, the near-death of the peace process, and the blockade of Gaza.[vi] In normal times, Gaza is often referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison.[vii] Israel severely restricts the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza.[viii] This has devastated the economy and crushed peoples’ hope for their futures. Even before this latest war, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, estimated that 63% of Gaza’s population was dependent on international aid and more than 80% of the population lived in poverty.[ix] The Palestinian Water Authority reported that 90% of its water was undrinkable, and the World Food Program estimated that 60% of Gazans are food insecure.[x] Gazans have been victims of brutal systemic structural and physical violence for 15 years, and it is in that near-hopeless environment that an organization like Hamas is able to take control. If those underlying conditions don’t change, Israel could carpet bomb Gaza, take out every single Hamas militant, cut Gazans off from the rest of the world, and another entity like Hamas would simply pop up again and again.
2. Israel is Defending Itself
President Biden has consistently stated Israel has a right to defend itself and that any country facing such an attack would have to respond. This is true. But how is cutting off water access to the civilian population self-defense?[xi] How is denying food to over a million Gazan children self-defense?[xii] How is the bombing of hospitals, mosques, and one of the world’s oldest churches, where women and children were sheltering- self-defense?[xiii] It isn’t. It is collective punishment.[xiv] Israel’s genocidal campaign is not about security, it is about exercising vengeance on the entire population of Gaza for the crimes of Hamas. This is immoral and illegal under international law and will not make Israel any safer.[xv] We know this because Israel has already waged war on Gaza four other times since 2007. None of those wars took out Hamas. None of those wars made Israel safe. What will be different this time?
President Biden has tried to sanitize Israel’s genocidal campaign by simply denying the death count. On October 25th, President Biden said, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling states, the truth about how many people are killed … I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”[xvi] Never mind that in response to Biden’s accusation, the Gaza Health Ministry published the name of every single person killed. All evidence points to the mass killing of civilians.[xvii] On October 14th, the IDF boasted it had dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza; more bombs dropped in one week than the US did in Afghanistan in all of 2019.[xviii] That alone grants validity to the ministry’s numbers. A recent report from the World Health Organization states, “Over half of the population of Gaza is now sheltering in UNRWA facilities and are suffering from hunger and malnutrition, dehydration and the spread of waterborne diseases.”[xix]
Given all this, I cannot help but wonder, does the President think we Arabs are made of Teflon? Or that we just belly dance our way through the bombings? Or perhaps we smother ourselves in hummus so that we can easily slip through the rubble? When you bomb us, when you starve us, when you deny us clean water, when you cut the electricity from our babies’ incubators, we die. The mental gymnastics it takes to deny the most basic fact of our humanity are absurd, but their consequences are catastrophic. On November 11th, two premature babies died at Al Shifa Hospital after the neonatal intensive care unit stopped working due to a lack of electricity.[xx] 37 other babies will soon die when the hospital completely runs out of fuel.[xxi] I’m forced to ask the same question, Congresswoman Tlaib asked on the House floor. In her words, “The cries of Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. What I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you.”[xxii] If we don’t hear those babies’ cries now, we will be left with the haunting sound of their silence.
3. If You Criticize Israel, You Are Antisemitic
This is one of the most sinister lies regarding this conflict. People who express solidarity with the Palestinian people or criticize Israel’s apartheid policies towards Palestinians are labeled as antisemitic. This is a dangerous lie because it distracts from the real antisemitism that exists globally. Recently, there has been a rise in antisemitic attacks in the U.S., which “reached their peak in 2022 with nearly 3,700 reported cases. These incidents include assault, vandalism, and harassment of Jewish people or those perceived to be Jewish.”[xxiii] Antisemitism is a real and dangerous injustice that should not be used as a political tool to shut down debate. Embedded in this argument is the idea that the Israeli government represents all Jews worldwide, and therefore, a criticism of the Israeli government is an attack on Jews. I consider this argument itself antisemitic because it implies all Jews have a duplicitous dual loyalty towards Israel.[xxiv] This argument also ignores the fact that the most vocal critics of the Israeli government are Israelis themselves. This past year there were massive protests against Netanyahu’s effort to usurp power from the Israeli judiciary, and just days after the October 7th attacks one of Israel’s leading newspapers, Haaretz, held Netanyahu’s policies responsible for the attacks.[xxv] Criticizing the Israeli government is not attacking the Jewish people, or even all Israelis, many of whom don’t feel represented by Netanyahu’s government at all. Empathy is not a limited resource. Solidarity with the Palestinians shouldn’t be seen as at the expense of Jewish people, or any other group. We all have a shared humanity, and our fates are intertwined. Perhaps this is most true for Palestinians and Israelis.
These lies lay the groundwork for genocide against Palestinians. Thousands have already died, and now that Israel began its ground invasion on October 27th, thousands more Palestinians will be killed.[xxvi] It is incumbent on President Biden to demand a ceasefire now. The dehumanization of Palestinians is killing people in Gaza, and here at home. Just last month a 6-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered in his home in Chicago. He was stabbed 26 times by his landlord as he was running to give the man a hug.[xxvii] They were once friends. His name was Wadea, which means peaceful, or calm, in Arabic. Dehumanization turns friends into enemies and steals the peace from our lives. Only when we recognize the humanity of all people, can we find the peaceful calm we all hope for.
[i] Boxerman, Aaron. “What We Know about the Death Toll in Israel from the Hamas-Led Attacks.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 Nov. 2023, http://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/world/middleeast/israel-death-toll-hamas-attack.html.
[ii] Al-Mughrabi, Nidal, and Humeyra Pamuk. “US Voices Concern over Killing of Palestinians as Gaza Death Toll Tops 11,000.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 10 Nov. 2023, http://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-officials-say-hospitals-come-under-new-israeli-attacks-2023-11-10/.
[iii] Wolfe, Daniel. “Water Is Running out in Gaza. It Will Mean More Deaths. .” The Washington Post, WP Company, 3 Nov. 2023, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-israel-water-crisis/.
[iv] Luhby, Tami. “US Aid to Israel and Ukraine: Here’s What’s in the $105 Billion National Security Package Biden Requested | CNN Politics.” CNN, Cable News Network, 20 Oct. 2023, http://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/politics/us-israel-ukraine-aid-package/index.html.
[v] Over 100 Aid Trucks Enter Gaza in a Day for 1st Time since Start Of … , http://www.timesofisrael.com/over-100-aid-trucks-enter-gaza-strip-for-first-time-since-start-of-israel-hamas-war/. Accessed 12 Nov. 2023.
[vi] “Timeline: How the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Fell Apart in the Three Decades after the 1993 Oslo Accord.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/timeline-israeli-palestinian-peace-process-1993-oslo-accord/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.
[vii] “Gaza: Israel’s ‘open-Air Prison’ at 15.” Human Rights Watch, 11 Oct. 2023, http://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/14/gaza-israels-open-air-prison-15.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Where We Work | UNRWA, http://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/gaza-strip. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
[x] “Crisis in Gaza: Why Food, Water and Power Are Running Out.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Oct. 2023, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/crisis-gaza-why-food-water-power-running-out.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Gostoli, Ylenia, and Abdelhakim Abu Riash. “‘We Were Baptised Here and We Will Die Here’: Gaza’s Oldest Church Bombed .” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 20 Oct. 2023, http://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/20/we-were-baptised-here-and-we-will-die-here-gazas-oldest-church-bombed.
[xiv] “Article 33 – Individual Responsibility, Collective Penalties, Pillage, Reprisals.” International Humanitarian Law Databases, ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-33#:~:text=No%20protected%20person%20may%20be,and%20their%20property%20are%20prohibited. Accessed 20 Nov. 2023.
[xv] International Humanitarian Law Databases, ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949?activeTab=undefined. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
[xvi] “Analysis | Biden’s Dismissal of the Reported Palestinian Death Toll .” The Washington Post, WP Company, 2 Nov. 2023, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/01/bidens-dismissal-reported-palestinian-death-toll/.
[xvii] Hogan, Patrick. “Hamas-Controlled Health Ministry Publishes Names of Thousands of People Killed in Gaza, after Biden Expresses Doubt about Conflict Death Toll .” CNN, Cable News Network, 27 Oct. 2023, http://www.cnn.com/2023/10/27/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-report-intl/index.html.
[xviii] “As Gaza Death Toll Soars, Secrecy Shrouds Israel’s Targeting Process.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 9 Nov. 2023, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/05/israel-strike-targets-gaza-civilians-hamas/.
[xix] “Women and Newborns Bearing the Brunt of the Conflict in Gaza, UN Agencies Warn.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/news/item/03-11-2023-women-and-newborns-bearing-the-brunt-of-the-conflict-in-gaza-un-agencies-warn. Accessed 12 Nov. 2023.
[xx] “Two Premature Babies Die, 37 under Threat at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital.” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 11 Nov. 2023, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/11/37-babies-at-risk-of-dying-in-gaza-hospital-israel-says-to-aid-evacuation.
[xxi] Ibid.
[xxii] Tlaib, Rashida. “Rashida Tlaib: ‘The Cries of the Palestinian and Israeli Children Sound No Different to Me’ .” The Nation, 9 Nov. 2023, http://www.thenation.com/article/politics/rashida-tlaib-speech-censure/.
[xxiii] Chavez, Nicole, and Nicquel Terry Ellis. “2022 Saw the Highest Rate of Recorded Antisemitic Incidents in the US. American Jews Fear the Israel-Hamas Conflict Could Make Things Worse .” CNN, Cable News Network, 13 Oct. 2023, http://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/us/us-jewish-community-fear-rise-antisemitism-reaj/index.html.
[xxiv] Davis, Julie Hirschfeld. “The Toxic Back Story to the Charge That Jews Have a Dual Loyalty.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22 Aug. 2019, http://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/jews-disloyal-trump.html.
[xxv] Editorial, Haaretz. “Netanyahu Bears Responsibility: Editorial.” Haaretz.Com, Haaretz, 7 Oct. 2023, http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2023-10-08/ty-article-opinion/netanyahu-bears-responsibility/0000018b-0b9d-d8fc-adff-6bfd1c880000.
[xxvi] Tavernise, Sabrina, et al. “Israel’s Invasion Begins.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Oct. 2023, http://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/podcasts/the-daily/israel-invasion-gaza.html.
[xxvii] Yan, Holly, et al. “A 6-Year-Old Palestinian-American Was Stabbed 26 Times for Being Muslim, Police Say. His Mom Couldn’t Go to His Funeral Because She Was Stabbed, Too.” CNN, Cable News Network, 17 Oct. 2023, http://www.cnn.com/2023/10/16/us/chicago-muslim-boy-stabbing-investigation/index.html.
Leave a Reply