Dear Auburn Students,
On October 1, the Israeli Navy detained dozens of rickety, barely sea-worthy vessels sailing to the Gaza coast. On board were massive quantities of humanitarian aid, intended for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza starving from the blockade established by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). From all indications, the Global Sumud Flotilla, as it’s called, was operating within the boundaries of international law.
Israel’s justification was that the flotilla was a front for Hamas. This, of course, is patently, on its face, a lie. If Israel actually believed it, they would have killed everyone on board. They certainly didn’t have any qualms with violating basic international law to accomplish its goals. It didn’t stop them from dressing up as medics to get into a civilian hospital to kill suspected Hamas leaders; it didn’t stop them from hiding in aid trucks to infiltrate refugee camps, where hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered; it certainly hasn’t stopped them from shelling Gaza, one of the densest urban environments on Earth, with half of its population being under the age of 15. If the IDF and the Israeli government actually believed this, none of those people who were detained should have been allowed to see the light of day.
Instead, they were sent back to their homes.
The people of Gaza are starving. Despite the Israeli government’s claims, aid is not getting into the strip at the rate necessary to avoid famine; there are only four distribution centers, and sometimes they are only open for 10 minutes at a time. Not to mention, the distribution centers themselves are killing centers, where mercenaries and IDF soldiers fire on crowds of starving Palestinians without concern for the consequences.
Nobody knows how many Palestinians are dead. The 50,000 dead claimed by the Gaza Health Ministry is a significant undercount, including only those that it can verify with a body and only in relation to the war itself. The other deaths from the lack of food, lack of medical care and lack of shelter are not even included. Some estimate the death toll is well over 100,000. It’s hard to know, considering that most of them are buried under rubble, their bodies often left to rot for lack of the heavy machinery needed to clear it.
This is the situation the flotilla was trying to help alleviate. If Israel could not (or would not) give the aid, then they would. But Israel stopped them. Why? The answer was given in the hours after October 7, 2023 by then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed […] We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
This is nothing less than genocide. This is the systematic slaughter of men, women and children, an act of revenge for October 7. Humiliated, they desire to wipe out these “animals” from the strip.
There’s been rumblings of this for years now. Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted to begin “voluntary migration” for Palestinians in Gaza to South Sudan; Trump himself said he wanted to remove the Palestinians in Gaza.
Why? It’s their home. They can rebuild at home. Why uproot them from their homes, where their ancestors had lived for generations, some reaching back even into the times of Rome’s occupation of the Levant, when Jesus was first preaching?
It’s to get rid of them, to colonize it. It’s already being done in the West Bank, as settlers continue to drive Palestinians ever further into smaller and smaller enclaves. Lynchings are common there, as Israeli settlers consider it “their” land. They speak about it quite openly. They even beat an American citizen to death, with no consequence.
America has spent the past three years doing nothing, nothing but actively assisting Israel in its quest for genocide. Whether it be Joe Biden or Donald Trump, our leaders have made it clear: Palestinians aren’t human — not like Israelis, who matter more.
We are dealing with a nuclear armed state, one that is willing to do anything to maintain its genocidal program against Palestinians, and Palestinians in Gaza in particular. The flotilla, though violating no international law, violated a more sacred law: Israel’s right to kill whoever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they want. These are not the acts of a state that has a desire to participate constructively in the international arena. If North Korea had done this, we would have invaded yesterday.
This could all be stopped at once. This is not a complex issue for us Americans. In fact, it’s quite simple. The question is: do we want to be party to a genocide of innocent men, women and children? My answer is: no, no I do not. I do not care if the person shooting civilians is a Jew or a Gentile, from a democratic nation or a dictatorship, man or woman: genocide is wrong. We could cut the arms shipments, and Israel’s war would grind to a halt. We wouldn’t even need to lift a finger besides that.
Why don’t we? Easy: because Israel is our ally. Israel is useful to us, therefore, we back them to the hilt. But, really, is it useful for us — the average American citizen? No. How are we safer in a world that justifies genocide as long as it is being done by one of your allies?
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It doesn’t matter if that occurs in the American south, apartheid South Africa, or, today, Israel. If not, then, we will have shown to the world that, really, humanity never learned anything from World War II and from the Holocaust.
Palestine must be free. Gaza must be free, as does the West Bank. Anything less is an insult to our ancestors, to their sacrifices at defeating fascism 80 years ago.
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