Gaza and guilt

I write forgive me, not forgive us, because this guilt is deeply personal. It’s a burden I carry in the comfort of my home, sipping clean water while the children of Gaza drink from brine water wells mixed in sewage – their small bodies wracked with dehydration and disease – if they even find water at all.

I can pluck wild mallow leaves from my backyard – not to satisfy hunger, but for the luxury of a healthy diet. I’m guilty of throwing away leftovers, when fathers and mothers in Gaza search through the rubble of demolished homes for a can of food that might have survived an Israeli bomb. Or they dare crawling through cratered fields, scavenging for wild greens to silence their children’s growling stomachs – only to become moving targets under the cold gaze of Israeli drones.

Forgive me – I have a home, a heater and blankets to keep my children warm. While in Gaza, parents lie awake – not just from the cold, but from the torment of being unable to warm their children’s tiny, freezing feet.

Forgive me when I kiss my daughter on her birthday and her laughter rings in my ears – while only the buzzing of Israeli drones rings in yours. She blows out her candles in a breath of joy, while you light a candle to push back the darkness, wheezing for air in a world that denies you breath.

I can hold my daughter, while you can’t even retrieve yours from beneath the rubble – can’t gather enough of her remains for one final embrace. American-made Israeli bombs scattered her flesh like sand in the wind, leaving you empty, aching with grief and dust.

Your hospitals, doctors, medics, and first responders who chose their professions to save lives – but became targets, because saving a Palestinian life is deemed existential threat for Israel. I beg forgiveness from every journalist whose words to expose war crimes became bullets, and whose cameras were more dangerous to Israel than cannons.

Forgive the world that calls your starvation, the destruction of schools and universities – and the murder of your educators – Israel’s “self-defense.”

Dear people of Gaza, forgive them if you once believed humanity had learned from the sins of African enslavement, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the European Holocaust. I repent, Gaza, if you believed that “Never Again” included you.

I’m sorry that the progeny of the victims of “Never Again” have organized under the agency of ADL, AIPAC, and Political Zionism to kosher a genocide – carried out in the name of Judaism. “Never Again” is not for everyone, dear Gaza; it is only for the white West and the self-chosen.

The ideological antisemites are now Israel’s closest allies. Today, “antisemite” no longer means those who hate Jews, but it is those who protest Israeli genocide. “Never Again” is monopolized by the professional victims – licensed by a god using past European cruelty to justify present Israeli injustice in Palestine.

I’m sorry, Gaza, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has betrayed you. Instead of shielding you, it became an arm of your oppressor. When the refugee camps of Jenin, Nur Shams, and Balata rose to support you, they faced not just Israeli force, but PA bullets and batons. And in cities and towns that didn’t rebel, the PA still failed to protect them from Jewish settler rampages – burning homes and groves, killing livestock, and shooting farmers.

Excerpted: ‘Forgive Me, Gaza…’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org