The silence of our friends
By Barb Olson
Madison-Rafah Sister City Project
Many otherwise liberal Americans hesitated to take sides during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza earlier this month.
“People have been fighting over that piece of land for thousands of years” some say. “Why can’t they all just learn to get along?”
Unfortunately, our government has already taken sides. The U.S provides the weapons of mass destruction that Israel used to wage murderous war on
1.5 million human beings trapped in what even the Vatican has called the Gaza concentration camp. The F-16 jet fighters, Apache helicopter gun ships,
phosphorous and cluster bombs, the mysterious weapon that burns like napalm and the one that explodes with such force that flesh is ripped from bone —
our taxes paid for all of this.
There can be no justification, none at all, for unleashing this murderous rain of terror and death on a miserable little piece of land smaller than Dane
County where 750,000 children have no place to hide or to run to.
There can be no justification for destroying over 4,000 homes, hundreds of private businesses and government offices, leveling two universities,
wiping out most of the agricultural capacity, or burning UN warehouses and schools with phosphorous bombs. No justification for bombing hospitals,
destroying clinics and ambulances, firing on medical personnel and firefighters, or herding a hundred terrified members of one extended family into a
building and then shelling it repeatedly.
All this was premeditated. By their own admission, Israeli politicians planned this attack for eight months. On November 4, while the world was
mesmerized by the U.S. presidential election, Israel broke its cease-fire with the Hamas government that the Israeli army had admitted was working. It
came into Gaza and killed six Palestinians, correctly calculating that as a result, Hamas would refuse to renew the agreement, especially since Israel had
also violated its terms by continuing its suffocating siege and blockade of Gaza.
Yet our state department and Congress provided political cover for Israel, shielding it from the outcry of a world shocked by the obscene scale of Gaza’s
destruction and enraged almost beyond comprehension by the pictures and the agony of over 6,000 people dismembered, burned, blown to bits, crushed
under the rubble of collapsed high-rises, injured or maimed.
With the exception of a brave few, including Milwaukee’s Rep. Gwen Moore (but shamefully not our own Tammy Baldwin or Senators Kohl or
Feingold), Democrats no less than Republicans proved to be loyal supporters of Israel’s military machine. This was in spite of the fact that only 31 percent
of ordinary Democrats polled supported Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is not rooted in some ancient Hatfield-McCoy dispute. It is a child of 19th-century imperialism’s old age, a Johnny-come-
lately throwback to the age of Western conquest and replacement of native peoples with colonial settlers.
Would we have said to the Native Americans, fighting to stay off the tearful trail to slow death in the miserable and impoverished concentration
camps known as reservations, their lands appropriated for European settlement, “Why can’t they just get along?”
Millions of Palestinians live in just such misery and deprivation in scores of refugee camps scattered around the borders of Israel, which took their
land and wealth and spit them out. Israel has neither paid compensation nor allowed them to return to their homes as the UN demands every single year.
Would we have said to the South Africans struggling to throw off apartheid, “Why can’t they all just get along?”
Palestinians under brutal military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem are fighting a form of Apartheid that Jimmy Carter has
warned against and many South Africans, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, have called worse than anything ever seen in their own country.
And finally, did any of us say to the opponents of U.S. racial segregation, to those who battled white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan, “Why can’t
they just get along?”
The Palestinians inside Israel live under in a Jim Crow regime of official and de-facto racism and discrimination. At any moment even their third-
class rights can be taken away (as happened this month when Jewish political parties voted to ban the Arab ones), and “uppity” behavior brings violence,
arrest or deportation.
There is one ominous way that the present resembles the ancient past. In the wars that were fought over territory in this region as elsewhere,
opponents routinely starved each other in terrible sieges and slaughtered each other’s civilians until rivers were said to have run red with blood. Collective
punishment of the defeated was the norm. There was no international law, no UN, no world outcry that could save innocent men, women or children from
their terrible fate. Whole cities, even civilizations were razed to the ground, buried and forgotten.
Israel and the U.S. are moving us back toward this law of the jungle. They have recklessly appropriated to themselves the right to violate international
humanitarian laws and the already weak “rules of war” as they see fit.
This does not mean that Palestinians need to join them. But it should cause us to question statements like “they just want to push Israel into the sea”. It
should make us ask if, under these conditions, some of us might also choose to fire home-made missiles over the concentration camp fence onto the very
fields where our grandparents farmed and onto the Israeli towns built over the rubble of the villages that they were expelled from.
As we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this month, we should ask whether or not Dr. King could offer any direction forward.
No one can claim to know what position Dr. King would have taken on the larger issues of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. While some have tried to enlist
him on the side of Israel, it is a fact that he never made any public written or spoken comment on this.
However, it is clear from Dr. King’s position on the Vietnam War, what position he would have taken on the recent bloodshed.
He would be against it, and he would be calling loudly and insistently for the stronger side – Israel and the U.S. – to stop its violence and to seek a
just solution.
Dr. King was an unwavering proponent of non-violence. Yet he did not hesitate to speak out on behalf of those who suffered disproportionately: the
Vietnamese people, who were at the time fighting militarily, as well as through other means, against the world’s most powerful military machine.
“What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms?” he said of the Vietnamese guerrillas in his Beyond Vietnam
speech of April 4, 1967. “How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence ... while we pour every new weapon of death into their land?
Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their
violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.”
I believe that Dr. King would recognize that there are a thousand ways to kill a people, to strangle them and uproot them, even exterminate them.
Walls, checkpoints, limits on movement and growth, denial of work and education, home demolitions, land confiscation, humiliation and starvation –
these too are forms of violence. In response, Palestinians have tried every form of non-violent resistance — civil disobedience, strikes, tax revolts,
demonstrations, lawsuits, appeals to the International Court of Justice and the UN.
But they are faced with overwhelming military superiority and an oppressor who is willing to use it without mercy. If we turn a deaf ear to their pleas,
then non-violence is doomed to failure and we have no right to demand that Palestinians commit collective suicide.
The “sanitized” and mainstreamed version of Dr. King’s message that has become popular in recent years might indeed respond to Palestinian
suffering by wondering, “Why can’t they all get along.”
But the real Dr. King was profoundly radical in his ringing call to stand up against the war of his day, displaying a clear bias for the poor and
downtrodden, and insisting that people of conscience speak out no matter what the political risk.
“In the end,” he said, “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Madison-Rafah Sister City Project
Many otherwise liberal Americans hesitated to take sides during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza earlier this month.
“People have been fighting over that piece of land for thousands of years” some say. “Why can’t they all just learn to get along?”
Unfortunately, our government has already taken sides. The U.S provides the weapons of mass destruction that Israel used to wage murderous war on
1.5 million human beings trapped in what even the Vatican has called the Gaza concentration camp. The F-16 jet fighters, Apache helicopter gun ships,
phosphorous and cluster bombs, the mysterious weapon that burns like napalm and the one that explodes with such force that flesh is ripped from bone —
our taxes paid for all of this.
There can be no justification, none at all, for unleashing this murderous rain of terror and death on a miserable little piece of land smaller than Dane
County where 750,000 children have no place to hide or to run to.
There can be no justification for destroying over 4,000 homes, hundreds of private businesses and government offices, leveling two universities,
wiping out most of the agricultural capacity, or burning UN warehouses and schools with phosphorous bombs. No justification for bombing hospitals,
destroying clinics and ambulances, firing on medical personnel and firefighters, or herding a hundred terrified members of one extended family into a
building and then shelling it repeatedly.
All this was premeditated. By their own admission, Israeli politicians planned this attack for eight months. On November 4, while the world was
mesmerized by the U.S. presidential election, Israel broke its cease-fire with the Hamas government that the Israeli army had admitted was working. It
came into Gaza and killed six Palestinians, correctly calculating that as a result, Hamas would refuse to renew the agreement, especially since Israel had
also violated its terms by continuing its suffocating siege and blockade of Gaza.
Yet our state department and Congress provided political cover for Israel, shielding it from the outcry of a world shocked by the obscene scale of Gaza’s
destruction and enraged almost beyond comprehension by the pictures and the agony of over 6,000 people dismembered, burned, blown to bits, crushed
under the rubble of collapsed high-rises, injured or maimed.
With the exception of a brave few, including Milwaukee’s Rep. Gwen Moore (but shamefully not our own Tammy Baldwin or Senators Kohl or
Feingold), Democrats no less than Republicans proved to be loyal supporters of Israel’s military machine. This was in spite of the fact that only 31 percent
of ordinary Democrats polled supported Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is not rooted in some ancient Hatfield-McCoy dispute. It is a child of 19th-century imperialism’s old age, a Johnny-come-
lately throwback to the age of Western conquest and replacement of native peoples with colonial settlers.
Would we have said to the Native Americans, fighting to stay off the tearful trail to slow death in the miserable and impoverished concentration
camps known as reservations, their lands appropriated for European settlement, “Why can’t they just get along?”
Millions of Palestinians live in just such misery and deprivation in scores of refugee camps scattered around the borders of Israel, which took their
land and wealth and spit them out. Israel has neither paid compensation nor allowed them to return to their homes as the UN demands every single year.
Would we have said to the South Africans struggling to throw off apartheid, “Why can’t they all just get along?”
Palestinians under brutal military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem are fighting a form of Apartheid that Jimmy Carter has
warned against and many South Africans, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, have called worse than anything ever seen in their own country.
And finally, did any of us say to the opponents of U.S. racial segregation, to those who battled white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan, “Why can’t
they just get along?”
The Palestinians inside Israel live under in a Jim Crow regime of official and de-facto racism and discrimination. At any moment even their third-
class rights can be taken away (as happened this month when Jewish political parties voted to ban the Arab ones), and “uppity” behavior brings violence,
arrest or deportation.
There is one ominous way that the present resembles the ancient past. In the wars that were fought over territory in this region as elsewhere,
opponents routinely starved each other in terrible sieges and slaughtered each other’s civilians until rivers were said to have run red with blood. Collective
punishment of the defeated was the norm. There was no international law, no UN, no world outcry that could save innocent men, women or children from
their terrible fate. Whole cities, even civilizations were razed to the ground, buried and forgotten.
Israel and the U.S. are moving us back toward this law of the jungle. They have recklessly appropriated to themselves the right to violate international
humanitarian laws and the already weak “rules of war” as they see fit.
This does not mean that Palestinians need to join them. But it should cause us to question statements like “they just want to push Israel into the sea”. It
should make us ask if, under these conditions, some of us might also choose to fire home-made missiles over the concentration camp fence onto the very
fields where our grandparents farmed and onto the Israeli towns built over the rubble of the villages that they were expelled from.
As we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this month, we should ask whether or not Dr. King could offer any direction forward.
No one can claim to know what position Dr. King would have taken on the larger issues of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. While some have tried to enlist
him on the side of Israel, it is a fact that he never made any public written or spoken comment on this.
However, it is clear from Dr. King’s position on the Vietnam War, what position he would have taken on the recent bloodshed.
He would be against it, and he would be calling loudly and insistently for the stronger side – Israel and the U.S. – to stop its violence and to seek a
just solution.
Dr. King was an unwavering proponent of non-violence. Yet he did not hesitate to speak out on behalf of those who suffered disproportionately: the
Vietnamese people, who were at the time fighting militarily, as well as through other means, against the world’s most powerful military machine.
“What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms?” he said of the Vietnamese guerrillas in his Beyond Vietnam
speech of April 4, 1967. “How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence ... while we pour every new weapon of death into their land?
Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their
violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.”
I believe that Dr. King would recognize that there are a thousand ways to kill a people, to strangle them and uproot them, even exterminate them.
Walls, checkpoints, limits on movement and growth, denial of work and education, home demolitions, land confiscation, humiliation and starvation –
these too are forms of violence. In response, Palestinians have tried every form of non-violent resistance — civil disobedience, strikes, tax revolts,
demonstrations, lawsuits, appeals to the International Court of Justice and the UN.
But they are faced with overwhelming military superiority and an oppressor who is willing to use it without mercy. If we turn a deaf ear to their pleas,
then non-violence is doomed to failure and we have no right to demand that Palestinians commit collective suicide.
The “sanitized” and mainstreamed version of Dr. King’s message that has become popular in recent years might indeed respond to Palestinian
suffering by wondering, “Why can’t they all get along.”
But the real Dr. King was profoundly radical in his ringing call to stand up against the war of his day, displaying a clear bias for the poor and
downtrodden, and insisting that people of conscience speak out no matter what the political risk.
“In the end,” he said, “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”