Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – There are mornings when we are unable to bear to listen to the news taking place in Gaza as it is so deeply distressing that the mind shuts down at the daily bombing and the horrific death count. The only parallel in literary terms can be found in Dante’s Inferno, a place where Israel’s leaders and their militaristic enablers will surely reside in the minds of future generations, How will the possibly atone for the slaughter of women and children, as they continue to justify their atrocities with specious arguments.
There are moral consequences for the wholesale destruction taking place. An ancient people is being destroyed and American complicity is clearly evident in the freely-given weaponry. As the well-known journalist, Thomas Friedman, in a NY Times article said: “The Israeli Government is Not our Ally” … “this ultranationalist, messianic Israeli government is not America’s ally. It’s priority is not peace with its neighbors, its priority is the annexation of the West Bank, the expulsion of the Palestinians of Gaza and the re-establishment there of Israeli settlements …”
Fear and in-fighting are beginning to haunt the land of Israel. A leading Israeli newspaper stated that: “…affidavits are “an earthquake” [that]”demand an indictment” …[which] resort to mere cliches in a crazy country where the ground is “quaking” every day and someone “demands an indictment” against his rival every other day.”(Yossi Verter, Haaretz)
It is well understood that the slaughter in Gaza is in full compliance with American support. This war a one-sided conflict in which American-Israeli air-power overwhelms the civilian population. What is taking place is a massacre, posing as a war, resulting in the utter destruction of every institution of higher learning and every hospital. Now there is even the denial of food, ostensibly as a weapon of war, to induce mass starvation. Two million Palestinians are compelled to live in Refugee tents and even these are unsafe with the resumption of bombing while the ceasefire has ceased being a ceasefire and the Israeli leadership has become bereft of even a modicum of moral scruples.
The poet W.H. Auden said it well “…those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”. This “evil” is being perpetrated upon an ancient indigenous people in willful ignorance of the generational traumas that the victims are suffering and will continue to suffer. Even the perpetrators will suffer the poison of the “serpent’s bite”, and what the Irish writer James Joyce called the “agenbite of inwit”, the deep gnawing guilt felt by consciences trying to atone for the generations of suffering caused by English leaders. In Exodus, it is said “ye shalt not afflict any widow or fatherless child…and they cry unto me I will surely hear their cry and my wrath shall wax hot…”(Exodus 22). Surely this “wrath [will] wax hot” and the “deep gnawing guilt” will play itself out upon generations yet to be born.
Middle East envoys: “met with a senior Israeli delegation in Qatar to discuss a truce in Gaza,…but Israel has refused to alter its position on cease-fire/hostage deal talks, an Israeli official told Haaretz (Haaretz)
Netanyahu relies upon the U.S. to give him international protection and rages against even the mildest criticism, such as from “French President Emmanuel Macron who said…Netanyahu’s policy in Gaza was “shameful” and that European countries should increase sanctions.”
“Gaza 36,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
Aid has not been able to enter Gaza for over two months even though there are plenty of available trucks, waiting to be allowed entrance. The UN Aid chief called “an Israel-initiated and U.S.-backed humanitarian aid distribution plan for Gaza a “fig leaf for further violence and displacement” of Palestinians. “It is a cynical sideshow. A deliberate distraction,” He told the UN Security Council that the UN has “rigorous mechanisms to ensure our aid gets to civilians and not to Hamas, but Israel denies us access, placing the objective of depopulating Gaza before the lives of civilians.”
Even the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force: “privately warned their superiors of an impending widespread starvation crisis in Gaza unless aid deliveries are immediately restored, the New York Times reported, citing three Israeli defense officials familiar with the conditions” (Haaretz News).
Other disastrous consequences of food and water denial are noted by the Gaza Health Ministry which: “…warned that 90 percent of residents are [already] suffering from water insecurity, with more than a quarter of water samples now contaminated, adding that this is contributing to the spread of disease. According to the ministry, nearly all of Gaza’s desalination plants are out of service…”
On the question of Genocide, seven leading international experts … were interviewed by NRC, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and were unequivocal: Not only have they all come to believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the vast majority of their peers in academia concur. “Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey. “Uğur Ümit Üngör, who works at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, agreed. Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman of Open University of Israel initially “opposed the genocide label” until Netanyahu’s government flouted the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza. … Strong waves of condemnation included an open letter signed by 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, stating that they cannot “turn a blind eye or remain silent at this renewed [onslaught on Gaza]”.
Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, … Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not on genetic differences.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved