Mom, You Taught Me to Say "Never Again." Well, It's Happening Again.

[Celerity]

https://newrepublic.com/article/198202/israel-gaza-genocide-never-again-happening-again

https://archive.ph/9mc26


Naeema, a 30-year-old Palestinian mother, holds her malnourished 2-year-old son, Yazan, in the Al-Shati refugee camp, on July 23.

Dear Mom,

It’s time for us to talk about Israel.

There was a while, half a year or so after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, when we weren’t talking with each other about much of anything. After months of sending dueling articles over family text threads on either the profound depravity or unfortunate necessity of Israel’s war in Gaza, it became clear that—like millions of other Jewish families across the country—we were talking past each other. So I mostly stopped engaging altogether. I just found it too bewildering, painful, and enraging to watch someone I love seemingly turn a blind eye to the indiscriminate death and destruction Israel was inflicting on Gaza.

But you’re my mom, and I’m your son, so this silence was unsustainable. Eventually, the freeze in our communications thawed. All that was required to maintain our détente was one unspoken rule: We do not talk about Israel. My therapist certainly approved. Yet the bewilderment, pain, and anger are all still there. As Israel’s crimes in Gaza continue to escalate, and the unspeakable horrors of those crimes pierce deeper into our brains, these feelings have been getting harder to ignore. At some point, it will do lasting damage to our relationship, and I don’t want that. So we need to talk about Israel.

Specifically, I need to express what it’s doing to my heart to see you—and much of your generation—fail to grapple with Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Because that is what we’re talking about here. Gaza now has the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world, Gazan children are being purposely targeted by IDF snipers, all civilian infrastructure across the region is being systematically leveled, Gazans are being regularly massacred at Israeli-run food distribution sites, and mass starvation is underway. This isn’t a war Israel is prosecuting, and hasn’t been for a long time, if it ever was. What Israel is pursuing, in the words of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” not from “some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit” but through “government policy—knowingly, evilly, irresponsibly dictated.”

And while campaigns of “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians” do not need to constitute genocide to morally necessitate opposition, there is a growing consensus—among those who know far more than we do about what is really happening in Gaza, and those who know far more than we do about genocide—that what Israel is doing in Gaza is, in fact, genocide. That is the conclusion of human rights organizations that have been operating on the ground there, from respected Israeli organizations like B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel to international organizations like Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch. And it is the conclusion of genocide experts like the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and the editor in chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.

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