Indifference to Innocents’ Suffering Is a Sickness

This morning, October 7, 2024, I received the following email notice from the Board Chair David Sherman and CEO David Halperin, both of Israel Policy Forum. It included a list of in-person events of remembrance scheduled for today in Toronto and in major cities across the United States.

“For Israelis and Jews across the world, October 7 is not a distant tragedy. It was an assault by Hamas terrorists on our people and a violation of our humanity that permeates our days with anguish. One year later, we remember the nearly 1,200 innocents murdered by Hamas—the most Jews slaughtered in one day since the Holocaust—and stand in solidarity with the survivors of the massacre, sexual violence, and other unthinkable atrocities.

And not for a single moment do we forget the 101 hostages still held captive by Hamas—only half of whom are estimated to be alive after one year in unimaginable conditions. Nor do we forget those whose lives were cut short while in Hamas captivity and those who died valiantly trying to secure their release since that black Saturday. Only once the hostages are brought home to their families will we begin to be able to see beyond this nightmare.”

I applaud these efforts and am horrified and outraged by the needless death and destruction perpetrated by Hamas militants on innocent Israeli citizens. I call on the people of Palestine to identify and bring to justice those among them who murdered the innocent on October 7.

I am horrified in solidarity with the people of Israel by Hamas’s unconscionable act of continuing to hold 101 hostages. I call on the people of Palestine to identify and bring to justice the leaders who continue to perpetrate these universally recognized crimes.

I am deeply saddened and discouraged by the ongoing failure and loss of life among those in the Israeli military who continue the battle to find and secure those hostages. I call on the people of Israel to halt these counter-productive wars and bring their loved ones home.

But I am also horrified and discouraged by the total absence of any acknowledgement of Israel’s destruction of 20,000 innocent lives in Gaza since October 7, and its repeated displacement of hundreds of thousands on a moment’s notice. I call on the people of Israel to identify and bring to justice those government leaders who are responsible for these unjustifiable and counter-productive crimes of war.

The failure to recognize or even acknowledge the suffering of the people of Gaza represents an implicit denial of the simple fact that Palestinians are people, that they exist, and that they too are worthy of consideration as fellow humans. This implicit denial of personhood is, by definition, sociopathic. It characterizes far too many of those in positions of power in the Israeli government, far too many Israeli citizens, and far too many American citizens who support Israel’s God-given biblical privilege to occupy all of Palestine and its current self-destructive wars in Gaza and Lebanon in service of that religious dogma. I call on the Israel Policy Forum to amend their heart-felt efforts by removing their sociopathic indifference to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Strikingly, the same lack of mention and therefore the same implicit denial of personhood is found in the United States Constitution. There, it is for indigenous and enslaved people, for their descendants, and for women. I am horrified and ashamed by this disgrace, that sociopathy is enshrined in our Constitution and still remains 250 years later. The violence and disservice we have done and continue to do to what amounts to 60% of our population is done in the name of all Americans, regardless of the fact that almost all of us are powerless to change it, just as most Israelis and Palestinians are powerless to change the policies of their leaders. Our peoples, even the weakest of us, Palestine, have enormous power for destruction. We must place the destructive legacy of past wrongs behind us, and make the tough choices that return our shared humanity to our policies, no matter how difficult. That is the only path away from destruction and toward the productive and ethical/righteous lives that we all deserve.