Weekly Briefing: It takes a genocide to open Americans’ eyes

The good news is that amid the tragic absurdity of American lives even going on in a humdrum privileged fashion while our country is sponsoring a genocide in Gaza – the good news is that yesterday the Palestinian voice announced itself to this country as never before in a thrilling political action. The largest pro-Palestine demonstration in our history shut down Washington, D.C., and everywhere you looked there were signs that Palestinians have seized the right to narrate their struggle and demand the nation pay attention. I was never prouder to be in our nation’s capital, as I was yesterday.

Indeed, there were many indications this week that evidence of Israeli genocide is breaking in on the coddled swaddled American mind, and can things ever be the same? Will Middle East policy and the Democratic Party ever be the same when so many Americans have seen a father crouching over the rubble from the latest Israeli bomb listening for the sounds of his child, then lifting his head in desolation, and placing it back on the rubble?

“Everyone we know is dying, and no one knows who will be next. Every missile and airstrike we hear is another person gone, another friend or family member or fellow traveler erased from the civil registry. The only sin we’re guilty of is that we were born here,” writes Tareq Hajjaj in another of his incredible reports for us, mourning his own friends.

No, it cannot be the same. Americans who accepted Israel’s existence as a Jewish state because that was the decision of the world a generation or two ago, and why upset the settled order – they are stirring and seeing, because of the massacre of thousands of children.

So the good news is that this is a teachable moment– about what Zionism’s answer is to the people who lived in that land before them, and about what Zionism’s idea of democracy is—so I’d throw in a couple added pointers.

It’s apartheid, people. For all the nonstop coverage of the Gaza war on the networks, they are leaving out apartheid. But countless human rights organizations have concluded it’s apartheid. The people who live there tell us it’s apartheid, and so do Jimmy Carter, Betty McCollum, Rashida Tlaib, and IfNotNow. This is just the plain truth about the nature of Jewish supremacy. Leaving out apartheid is like talking about Alabama in the 60s without saying Jim Crow, segregation.

When PBS News Hour hosts a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, to say that we used “to mow the lawn” in Gaza but now this onslaught is going past mowing the lawn, he is talking in hateful slang about war crimes and genocide. Halevy:

The founder of the [Hamas] movement was a spiritual leader, who ultimately we killed. We then had what was called mowing the lawn…. You have a confrontation. You mow the lawn. You bring the grass down to a lower level. And then it begins to grow and it grows.

Mowing the lawn was a policy of totally-extrajudicial assassination, including of Sheikh Yassin in his wheelchair, and of routine bombing of apartment buildings and streets where a militant was thought to be, killing tons of civilians. Mowing the lawn would never take place in a Jewish city, even if the Palestinian militant was there, because Jewish life is more precious. No, mowing the lawn is a repulsive fascistic phrase, and PBS should not be treating it as a legitimate policy.

When the American Jewish Committee puts out ten points about the Gaza war from Ted Deutch, the former congressman, and there are several notes about antisemitism and the Hamas attacks of October 7, and no mention at all of the 10,000 Palestinian deaths and the thousands of children killed and the inhuman suffering in Gaza, you know there is something terribly wrong with the American Jewish leadership, the Congress, and indeed the Biden administration too.

There is a culture of hateful blindness to Palestinian life and death inside our power structure. And inside the Jewish community, too with great exceptions. And yes, it goes way back. It goes back to 1948, to the Nakba and the massacres of that period, and before that too.

Gaza is stirring all this up. A genocide in the context of our privileged lives– of walking the dog and shopping for dinner and croissants and guitar lessons and art openings and Halloween parades and the big games on TV – a genocide is unsettling.

So blessings and gratitude to the 300,000 people who took to the streets of Washington to stun the power structure.

Thanks for reading,

Phil Weiss