Gaza is the Defining Moral Crisis of Our Time

We have to talk about Gaza. It is the defining moral crisis of modern history. One of the reasons people don't get it is that you cannot understand what is happening in Gaza without understanding the history of Israel and Palestine, because October 7 did not descend from the sky and history did not begin the day Hamas attacked Israel.  Not at all.  

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Горный пейзаж с облаком дыма

When Britain issued the Balfour Declaration which gave Israel a homeland in 1917, approximately 90 percent of the population of Palestine was Palestinian, while roughly 8 to 10 percent was Jewish. The Balfour Declaration itself did not divide Palestine or assign a percentage of the land to a future Jewish state.  Things were okay.

Thirty years later, when the United Nations proposed partition, Jews made up roughly one-third of the population and Jewish individuals and institutions owned approximately 7 percent of the land, yet the proposed Jewish state was allocated about 55 to 56 percent of Mandatory Palestine, while the proposed Arab state received approximately 43 to 45 percent, with Jerusalem placed under international administration.

Okay, everybody take a deep breath. Jewish ownership was roughly 7 percent of the land, and the proposed Jewish state was given 55 percent of the country. Incredible, but true. Needless to say, the Palestinians did not want their homeland divided and that Jews who owned 7% of the land were given 55% of it. 

So they fought for what was theirs.  Nothing mysterious or irrational about that. That's what people do when their land is taken land their families have lived on for generations that now belongs to someone else.

During the war surrounding that division and the creation of Israel in 1948, approximately 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. Villages were emptied, homes and fields were lost, and families were scattered. These were not abstractions on a map. These were houses where parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had lived, land that families had farmed, olive trees that had been tended for generations, communities with histories that stretched back long before anyone in the West was paying much attention to the place at all.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees, and many of them and their descendants ended up in Gaza, the West Bank, and refugee camps throughout the region.  Their land the land of 700,000 Palestinians, was taken.  And they were forced into small ghettos.

And the taking did not simply stop in 1948. The West Bank has been carved up by occupation and settlements; the insane small sliver of Palestinian land has continued to be seized, and Israeli settlements have continued to expand in territory that was supposed to be part of a future Palestinian state.

Gaza was subjected to a blockade in which Israel controlled or heavily influenced much of what and who could move in and out. Its people were effectively trapped inside a tiny strip of land with nowhere to go.

Then came Hamas. You can condemn Hamas, and I have no problem saying that the deliberate killing of civilians is morally wrong, whoever does it. But you cannot understand why Hamas exists if you refuse to understand the conditions that produced it.

Hamas did not fall from Mars. It arose from a people who had lived through dispossession, occupation, military rule, exile, poverty, blockade, humiliation, and the steady disappearance of what little land remained to them. It also provided social services and presented itself as a force of resistance and liberation to many Palestinians. In the West, however, we tend to collapse the entire history into one convenient word: terrorist.

That word gets used selectively. When we bomb another country, invade it, destroy its infrastructure, kill civilians by the tens of thousands, and call the operation liberation, we are all like rah rah America.  Go USA.  We don't see we are the real terrorists.

When the people living under our bombs rise up and fight back, we call them terrorists. We bombed Iraq with shock and awe and killed and displaced millions of human beings. Armed freedom fighters rose up against our occupation of their land, and we called them terrorists. Libya was bombed and shattered by us, and armed resistance and revenge followed. We called them terrorists. Again and again, America reserves for itself the language of defense, security, and freedom while the people beneath the bombs are given one word: terrorist.

Look in the mirror, America.  You are the biggest terrorist nation in modern history.  

Israel has done the same thing with Hamas. October 7 was a horrific attack, and innocent people were killed. That is true. But it was also an eruption from a history that the world had spent decades refusing to confront. Palestinians were watching settlements expand across the West Bank, watching the possibility of a viable Palestinian state disappear, watching Gaza remain under blockade, and watching the world demand that they accept a future in which they possessed less and less of the land that had once been theirs.  They had simply been through too much.  Too much had been taken.  And, the small sliver of land left?  Israeli settlements were taking that too.  

Then Israel answered October 7 with a genocide that was unthinkable.  An abomination.  700,000 Palestinians have been killed, injured, or left missing beneath the rubble, according to varying estimates and methodologies.
The people were trapped in Gaza, the sea on one side, Israel on the other.  Israel went in there and slaughtered all of it.  Gaza is gone.  Families have been buried together. Children have been killed in numbers so staggering it is beyond horrific.

Hospitals, schools, homes, refugee camps, roads, water systems, and the basic infrastructure necessary for human life have been destroyed. People who were told to flee found themselves bombed where they fled. There was no safe place because Gaza is a tiny strip of land enclosed by borders its people do not control.

And through it all, the United States has armed Israel, funded Israel, protected Israel diplomatically, and, far too often, applauded Israel. We lecture the world about human rights, democracy, international law, and the rules-based order, and then when those rules become inconvenient, we look away from the bodies and send more weapons.

You do not have to excuse Hamas to understand history. You do not have to celebrate October 7 to understand desperation. You do not have to hate Jews to oppose the actions of the Israeli government. You do not have to pretend that the killing of Israeli civilians was acceptable to recognize that the Gaza Genocide is an abomination. Human beings do not become legitimate targets for slaughter because they were born on the wrong side of a border.  

But what we cannot do anymore is pretend this began on October 7. It began with dispossession, with empire drawing lines on maps, with promises made by powerful nations about land that belonged to other people, with war, expulsion, occupation, settlements, blockade, and decades in which Palestinians were expected to endure quietly and die politely so that the rest of us would not have to feel uncomfortable.

We watched the Gaza Genocide happen. We paid for it. Our government armed it. Too many politicians applauded it, too many media voices rationalized it, and too many of us learned to look away from images that should have broken something open inside us. Someday history will ask what we did while Gaza was being destroyed, and I am afraid of the answer. May our souls be damned if we knew, if we watched, if we had the power to say no, and instead chose silence.

Nancy O'Brien Simpson