Deborah sits under her tree and prophesies mass deaths in Gaza

There is an old saying attributed to the Chinese: If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

Not only that, but also: Silence is complicity (as noted by Albert Einstein, Desmond Tutu, and MLK, among many others).

If we are not careful, Messrs. Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir will end up getting to where they are heading with their Gaza policy, and where they are heading is unmistakably toward a Final Solution of one kind or another: Mass death among more than two million Gaza civilians due to starvation and disease, or a mass expulsion of starving and dying Gazans to somewhere else.

When will we ordinary Israelis stand up en masse and speak out against this indefensible policy which, at best, can be called a process of mass extermination and ethnic cleansing by neglect – or, at worst, the progress of mass extermination and ethnic cleansing by design. Most of the world is already calling what we are doing a genocide.

That we are too preoccupied – with our own deep and continuing trauma, our own injured and dead, our tortured and abandoned hostages, our existential fears for our own safety and our children’s future – to speak out about what is taking place in Gaza, does not diminish our responsibility. It was Abraham Joshua Heschel who warned that only some are guilty but all are responsible.

October 7^th was the trigger, not the context

That it was Hamas pulling the trigger on October 7, 2023 is obvious but irrelevant. On October 9^th, as documented extensively in Israeli and foreign media, including in the most recent report from Defence of Children International–Palestine, former Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant declared a complete siege on Gaza: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

In mid-October 2023, Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, declared that “the only thing that needs to enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of explosives by the Air Force, and not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” Member of Knesset Revital Gotliv suggested that a successful campaign for Israel would require “hunger and thirst among the Gazan population.”

For the next year and a half, the DCI report continues, “Israeli decision makers, forces, and government officials ensured that Palestinians’ access to food and potable water was withheld. Through the withholding of aid, the deliberate targeting of food sources like bakeries and flour mills, blocking and destroying aid convoys, and destroying agricultural land, Israeli authorities have intentionally engineered the famine and starvation that have impacted every Palestinian in Gaza, especially children.”

It may already be too late

Today, for tens of thousands of Gazan children, women, seniors and disabled, it is already too late. And we are almost out of time to stand up, speak out, and change the trajectory of what is being done in our name before it is too late to avoid the inevitable consequences for the entire Gaza population.

Imagine that, in the event of mass deaths from famine and disease, which appear to be imminent, the people still alive in Gaza may be too weak to prepare the dead for proper burial or even to bury them without any of the traditional preparations. What will we do then, when our government orders our army to send in our combat engineer sons and grandsons with giant Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to scrape up the bodies and bury them in mass graves without dignity or ritual of any kind? This scenario of horror may not yet be inevitable but neither is it unlikely. The IDF may have excluded most foreign journalists from the Gaza Strip but, thanks to cellphone videos, an endless stream of gruesome images of the suffering of its people will continue to be broadcast worldwide, indefinitely. Long after Hamas has become a historical footnote, what we have done there will remain etched in human memory for generations to come, with our children and grandchildren identified as the perpetrators and our politicians as the architects.

I willingly confess that I have no answers as to how to interrupt this trajectory and reverse the campaign toward a Final Solution in Gaza – urgently. Israeli, Palestinian, and international peacemakers young and old persist in searching for consensus on strategies to realign the regional dynamic toward a just peace and sustainable reconciliation, but these efforts take time. A recent shift in Israeli public opinion features more numerous centrist voices raised against the deliberate starvation of children (as analyzed, for example, by Meron Rapoport in 972mag.com) – but this is far from indicating that the tide overall has turned. Leading figures in the governing coalition in Israel evidently remain satisfied with the current grim path. New protests are emerging in which ordinary Israelis stand in silent vigil holding portraits of dead Gazan children and, despite police efforts to suppress it, that movement is growing – but clearly not fast enough. What is obvious is that, absent immediate and ongoing mass protests in the streets by tens of thousands of ordinary Israelis, determined national strikes, and the like, no significant policy change will be forthcoming, and maybe not even then. But we have to try. We have to try.

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