Look, I am not a pundit or a student of history. I am not qualified to debate my position on what is going on in Palestine or Israel. I am just an empathetic person, a pacifist by nature and a poet. I am intuitive and heart-centered and generally process my feelings through metaphor.
But sometimes I have to step out of my poet-skin to express something prosaic. I can say things in poetry quite authentically and expressively that simply cannot be transposed into prose. The poetic commentary is far more accurate than lining up my thoughts to have my say. But here goes. I just want to weigh in for the moral record.
I always wondered how the world could stand by while the Nazis exterminated the Jews starting in the second half of the 1930s, tightening their grip on Jewish communities, perfecting their draconian fascist methods of control, pretty much patenting their genocidal "solution". And I always prided myself in thinking that I would not have stood for it. Turns out, it's the easiest thing! You just distract yourself, which we are great at in this country.
I am reminded of how the United States used the 9/11 attack as a gold card to begin its War on Terror, becoming the world's biggest terrorist threat herself. There is no international organization or entity that can influence the top-down decision process of the Pentagon when it wants to either supply weapons to a strategic ally or bomb an enemy. Not even Congress. (Certainly not Nato or the UN.) (The Vietnam War was never declared a war by an Act of Congress. It was a series of resolutions that gave a series of presidents power to use military force without a formal declaration of war.)
We have seen how this works over and over. But the War on Terror was different. It was official American policy. And it dovetailed nicely with tacit permission for domestic white supremacists to start organizing and acting from their own playbooks to go after whomever they wanted to harass, deport or jail.
Israel took good notes after 9/11, using the October 7, 2023: Hamas attack on Israel, (resulting in over 1,200 deaths and approximately 250 hostages taken) to begin its invasion of Gaza and the decimation of Palestinians, unabated.
They also understudied how the Nazis treated the Jews in Eastern Europe (and Germany) by deporting, sequestering and uprooting them in the second half of the 1930s. The only difference between the Israelis treatment of Palestinians and the Nazi treatment of the Jews leading into WW2, is that so far the Israelis have not gassed them.
It breaks my heart that this is really all I have to say. Well, that is a metaphor. My heart isn't "broken", but it is struggling right now to write this because (here is another metaphor) it ends at the edge, over which I dare not peer.
I encourage anyone who does have influence and power to use it without delay to do whatever they can to change this (in the journalistic sense) "story". We are all in it. And it's not new, but the victims are and the perpetrators are.
That's all I have to say right now.
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