A Blog from David Crump
The following report from Al Jazeera news contains several stories. First, you will see images from the war in Gaza that the MSM seldom, if ever, show.
Second, a Palestinian-Israeli journalist describes the frightening increase in racist threats and authoritarianism emerging in Israeli society today.
I am happy to say that these two men are both friends of mine. In this video from the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME), Bruce asks the questions and Jonathan offers a discussion drawing from his years of experience as a lawyer of international and humanitarian law.
Jonathan does a good job of explaining the Christian perspective on the horrors of war.
What would I have done?
That’s the common question we usually ask ourselves when watching a movie like “Schindler’s List,” the academy award winning film about one man’s efforts to rescue Jews from Hilter’s gas chambers.
Schindler risked his life to save others. And he was not the only one.
Others such as the Dutch woman, Corrie Ten Boom, broke the law by hiding Jews inside their homes, risking their freedom while trying to rescue people like Anne Frank, who hid in her neighbor’s attic.
Even though the majority of German church pastors supported the Nazi regime, there was a small minority of faithful ministers of the gospel who eventually lost their freedom because they would not remain silent in the face of Nazi criminality.
Books like Defying Hitler tell the stories of the many ways in which ordinary people in Nazi Germany said No, refusing to march with the majority who refused to speak up or to act out against the wanton atrocities unfolding around them.
Which, again, raises the question, What would I have done?
Would I have remained inactive and silent? Or would I have spoken up, protested, or used whatever means I had at my disposal to work against the genocide and save whomever I could?
Now we all know the answers to those questions. We don’t have to wait any longer.
We are living in a unique moment of history. For a real genocide, a horrendous program of ethnic cleansing is now occuring before our eyes.
Though the American/Western mainstream media gives it all scant attention, anyone with a wider bandwidth of human interest can watch the scandalous, ugly images of daily attrocities as they unfold in real time.
Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Electronic Intifada, The Gray Zone, and the Katie Halper Show (among others) are thankfully offering the news coverage that corporate America does not want us to see.
And that news is shockingly repetitious. For what Israel is now doing in Gaza and the West Bank “is a textbook case of genocide.” Those are not my words but the words of Craig Mokhiber, formerly the Director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights.
Mr. Mokhiber is the former director because he recently resigned from his position at the United Nations over its efforts to censor his reports on Israel’s attrocities in Gaza.
As a result, Mokhiber ranks among the heroes with Mr. Schindler and Corrie Ten Boom for doing what he could to speak out, protest, and even to hinder the genocide unfolding before our eyes.
He has shown us how he answers the question, “What would I have done?”
It is all too easy to cast ourselves as heroes in our own imaginations, especially when we have no contemporary circumstances to offer us an immediate heroic option.
So, I always imagine myself the hero. But today I do not need to imagine anything. I can face the evidence squarely by looking at my actions today.
What am I doing today to protest, to act, to work against the textbook case of genocide now being written in the pages of modern history with Palestinian blood?
This is the answer for both you and me.
If I am doing nothing to defend Palestinian life today, then that’s what I would have done to defend Anne Frank — nothing.
If I am doing nothing to protest the genocide now occurring in Gaza, then I would have remained silent as I inhaled the stench of Auschwitz.
We can all go to bed tonight knowing that we have answered the perpetually troubling moral question: What would I have done?
Can you still sleep well?
Not long ago I wrote about my young Palestinian friend, Anas, who had been arrested by the Israeli army.
A few days ago, Anas’ wife and family received news from the local, West Bank military authority telling them about his situation.
Anas was being held in an Israeli prison under the conditions called “administrative detention.” That is, he was not charged with any crime. There are no plans for a trial date. He was simply being held for six months in a military prison.
(There is no “civil jurisdiction” for Palestinians in the West Bank because they live under military occupation. Military rule is all they know.)
At the end of that six month period, Anas may be imprisoned for another six months — again without any criminal charges, trial, or recourse to a defense attorney.
But then, as a friend of mine who is a Palestinian defense attorney once said, “Without charges, evidence, or a trial date, there is nothing for a defense attorney to do within the military prison system.”
This unjust process of administrative detention may be repeated indefinitely.
During its recent ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, Israel released a number of Palestinian prisoners, mainly women and children, in exchange for Israeli hostages.
These were the visible prisoner swaps shown to us in public.
Anas is now a part of the other invisible prisoner swap taking place in the West Bank, often under the cover of darkness.
For every Palestinian prisoner released in a publicized, photographed hostage exchange, Israel is busy kidnapping and detaining many more Palestinian hostages whose stories will never be told on CNN or MSNBC.
Israel is busy ensuring that none of its dark, cold prison cells will remain empty.
This new generation of prisoners, like Anas, are also hostages; additional bargaining chips held indefinitely in brutal military prison conditions for whatever inhumane games Israel decides to play with their lives in the months to come.
If you are a praying person, please pray for my friend Anas, as well as the many other Palestinian hostages now held in Israeli prisons whose only crime is being Palestinian.
Learn about Israel’s “Hannibal Directive” — that is a long-standing Israeli military directive that instructs soldiers to kill their own people before allowing them to be taken as hostages.
Evidence continues to mount indicating that a good deal of the death and destruction committed in southern Israel on October 7 was due to Israeli military fire, not Hamas.
Journalist Max Blumenthal of the Gray Zone lays out the evidence:
Jenin is a city with a large refugee camp located in the northern part of the West Bank. Watch the video and note the way “the most moral army in the world” treats Palestinian children.
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh6eJHBkVEk”
If the embedded link in blocked, then copy the address without the quotation marks and watch on your computer.
Khan Younis is a city in Southern Gaza. This former member of the Israeli Knesset is openly calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza on Israeli national news.
Independent journalist Ben Norton has compiled a litany of statements made by Israeli leaders, both political and military, loudly proclaiming their goals for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
They make no bones about it. Israel’s final objective is to eradicate all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Carpet bombing the people is a piece of their strategy.
And they are accomplishing their goals. Thus far, 1.5 million people have been displaced. Over 11,000 have been killed; 4,500 of them children; over 20,000 are missing.
The USA and other western powers remain silent.