Weekly briefing: Washington’s approval of unending massacre is a ‘stain upon our souls’

Do you notice that western media are turning away? They are trying to diminish what is happening in Gaza, pack it away into the normal run of the news. So many people died in Gaza today– just another statistic.

That’s way more comforting than saying, It’s now six weeks of the United States arming a war on millions of innocents in their homes and now tents and hospitals in an open-air prison the size of Philadelphia.

Then you think of the euphemisms that preceded the “war between the Israeli army and Hamas terrorists.” Managed conflict. A positive term wielded by pundits, to rationalize oppressing Palestinians and killing them in the hundreds every year, not thousands. The status quo is unsustainable. A way of saying, It’s very uncomfortable to visit Palestine, but we won’t call it what it is, apartheid, and we can’t do anything about it either. And our most august professional organizations will keep their mouths shut.

At this website, we can’t look away. It’s been another devastating week in a neverending procession of devastation. The World Health Organization says al-Shifa hospital is a “death zone,” with waste piled on the grounds, and 291 patients inside and 25 staff, and 32 premature babies.

More than 12,000 Palestinians are now dead, including more than 5,000 children, and 400,000 are said to be fleeing the north of Gaza to the south on a “corridor of humiliation”, but Khan Younis is also under attack by the most modern ordinance fired by that most moral army in the world.

And the Democratic establishment is in lockstep now, supporting the massacres. Joe Biden wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post pushing for more bombing in “a war for democracy,” as Palestine Media Action summarizes his argument.

“The Biden administration has… plunged headlong into an abyss of moral depravity by supporting Israel materially in massacring thousands of Palestinians and rendering Gaza uninhabitable, and in condoning its ethnic cleansing within Gaza,” as Rashid Khalidi said at Columbia this week, a piece we published.

Our leaders are cracking down on opposition to the war and trying to push the story under the carpet.

AIPAC is preparing to spend $100 million to crush all progressive opposition to Israel’s actions in the Congress. The liberal cable networks feature Michael Oren and the Israeli army spokesperson explaining why a ceasefire is a victory for terrorists who will be in your house soon. The university presidents are issuing statements about antisemitism and redlining Palestinian solidarity organizations.

They are readying themselves for the next chapter of persecution blessed in Washington– when Gaza has undergone a Nakba-before-our-eyes and the world demands freedom and Israel seeks to “reestablish some form of the previous oppressive status quo of occupation and enclosure of Palestinians in smaller and smaller spaces, while pumping more formaldehyde into the moldering corpse of the long-dead ‘two-state solution,'” as Khalidi puts it.  

The good news is that consciousness is rising. Wide antiwar and pro-Palestinian activism has mobilized in the United States. Hundreds shut down the San Francisco Bay Bridge last week, parking cars and “tossing their keys into the bay.” Hundreds demonstrated at the Democratic National Committee last week, and were attacked by the police, and though the government and official media lied about why there was violence and arrests, the Democratic base knows.

There is a propaganda war in the U.S. Because 80% of Democratic voters believe there should be a ceasefire, Michael Arria reports; and 70 percent of young voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war.

The next generation sees the oppression. It sees the most sickening violence our government has licensed in recent memory, calls it genocide, and won’t turn away. Even the LA Times is demanding an end to the killings.

Under the propaganda war is a call to conscience.

“Staying quiet in this moment would be a stain upon our souls and would deepen our complicity… [W]e must call upon our leaders—President Biden, members of Congress, and others—to be unequivocal that we need to stop the killing. Today. This is clearly what love demands of us,” writes a Christian leader, Michael Curry, an Episcopal bishop.

Nothing could be more clear today. Don’t be silent. Don’t turn away. Bear witness and demand action. Keep the people of Gaza in your minds and hearts.

Thanks for reading,

Phil Weiss