Nancy Braus, until recently an independent bookseller, is a longtime activist who contributes often to these pages.
GUILFORD-Andrew Miller, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs just resigned. Yet another Biden official who likely can't look in the mirror when he sees the starving and tortured Palestinian children. Miller is the highest level Biden official to resign over this war, although he stated "family issues" as the cause. He had been critical of giving Netanyhu all the weapons and aid Biden has been unconditionally sending to Israel. I just arrived home to my partner weeping almost uncontrollably after he dove into the horrors facing those being massacred in the West Bank and Gaza.
As a Jewish person who has never been a zionist, has never been to Israel, I still never in my wildest dreams imagined that Israel could be actually behaving towards the Palestinians just as Hitler treated the Jews. Palestinians are humans- the vast majority are non-combatant people. People need a homeland, and they need homes, and they need food. These are all being denied. In Gaza, the destruction is so widespread that is appears clear that the Israelis are insuring that there will never be a home to which Gazans can return.
Approximately 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, many living on land their families have owned since forever. Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, and even declared illegal by the Israeli high court in 2005- and that decision has not been reversed. The illegality does not seem to bother any Israeli official at all, and in fact Smotrich, the far, far right finance minister lives in an illegal settlement in the West Bank, and has been given the power to welcome all the fascists from Brooklyn and Rockland County who decide that it would be fun to leave home and kill and torment some Palestinians. Meanwhile, the West Bank Palestinians would just like to live their lives and grow their olive trees. I'm no expert on this war, but if a person googles "Palestinian violence in the West Bank," all that pops up again and again is "Israeli settler violence against Palestinians," and "Palestinians living in fear in West Bank."
In Gaza, it is clear that the Israelis are planning to steal all the land from the residents, and make a nice beach resort for Jared Kushner and others to develop. The people of Gaza have no place to go, and the Israelis continue to commit mass murder. The Israelis justify murdering hundreds of civilians by destroying a residential area, dropping a 2 thousand pound bomb to supposedly kill one hamas fighter. Israel wants every Palestinian gone from the territory that was a peaceful homeland for them less than 100 years ago.
The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo states "starvation was a central strategy in the Nazi Genocide against the Jews. Hitler had long been aware of the power that lay in controlling the food." What have the Israelis been doing with aid trucks? Blowing them up. Blocking them. Throwing the food into the streets. It took me a while to accept that people could be so intentionally cruel and that the world would watch this happen. The United States has been absolutely horrible- building a stupid, collapsable, platform in the Mediterranean rather than make demands on the Israelis that they stop starvation policies immediately. Starvation is control- Hitler knew this in the treatment of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, intentionally allowing each resident a starvation ration of 180 calories a day.
Hitler stole everything Jews owned in Germany- land, houses, art, businesses, professional licenses. How is this different from stealing generational farmland in the West Bank? I am at a loss to see how the Isrealis consider this different.
My grandfather rescued 400 Jews from Nazi Germany. My great grandfather on the other side brought a family of distant relatives to New York- after the man of the couple survived Auschwitz. My family is very much part of the Jewish diaspora. I always grew up hearing "never again" about the German Holocaust. My own father turned his back on his belief in God due to the brutality of the Holocaust. Every day since the Israeli mass murders began after October 7, I ask myself "how is this possible? how are these people who should understand the injustice and horror of ethnic cleansing doing this to others?"
I will never understand.
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