Bonnie Price Lofton | Gaza tragedy calls to mind Holocaust stories
A half-dozen years ago, Rania Kharma of Gaza was my classmate, earning a master’s degree in conflict transformation from Eastern Mennonite University, a peace-oriented college in Harrisonburg. In October, 2007, Rania wrote me and others she knew at EMU to ask for our help in breaking “the siege on Gaza.”
Rania reported that Gaza had almost no food, medicine, fuel for cooking and generators, or access to materials for growing food or building homes. Residents could not leave Gaza for work or to further their education. They couldn’t even leave for medical care. Rania, who has worked for the United Nations and World Bank and who disliked Hamas, wrote: “Last time I was trying to cross the Erez checkpoint to Ramallah, there was a little child … around 7-8 years old… a cancer patient, who had an appointment in a hospital in Jerusalem. I will never ever in my whole life forget his little face covered with tears as he knew he was denied access.” By December, 2007, Rania reported that matters had worsened.
Today, a year later, the news is more horrific. Israel is bombing a place where 1.5 million people have no place to hide or run. They are sitting ducks in a small pond. Supposedly this will destroy the minority of men known as Hamas who came to power in Gaza in 2006 and who have launched homemade rockets that have killed fewer than 20 civilians in Israel, according to The Washington Post.
Israel’s actions go beyond an “eye for an eye.” Israel seems to be saying, “If I lose an eye, I will kill you and your entire extended family and all your neighbors. I will do so first by depriving you of food and other means of survival. I will block aid shipments, from whatever source, even from the United Nations and Red Cross. And if any one of you resists violently, I will kill all of you, even the children.”
Such heartlessness reflects a collective psyche hardened to cries of pain. It reflects an inability to empathize with those suffering. It reflects a rationalization that “our lives,” at whatever cost, matter more than a multitude of “other lives.”
In a former marriage, I was part of an extended family of Holocaust survivors – I was related to Polish Jews who escaped from an Auschwitz work camp and hid in an attic for years. I also was related to Jews who fled Nazi-occupied Austria. I listened to their stories, and I learned of Christian neighbors and schoolmates who turned on them. I learned of cruel people in Nazi Europe, as well as a handful of kind, courageous ones. When my Jewish family members said, “never again,” I said “amen.”
What happened to “never again”? Does it only apply to those who once suffered and not to those suffering now? Today the Palestinians look like the victims. They are living in what amounts to a huge prison camp, with bombs raining down.
I no longer hear from Rania. I can only pray that she and her family are safe. What news I get from Gaza comes from a young man in his early 20s named Sameh Habeeb. Describing himself as a “photojournalist and peace activist, humanitarian, and child relief worker,” Sameh somehow finds a way to post remarkably unemotional English-language reports at www.gazatoday.blogspot.com about the devastation around him.
Recently Sameh closed his e-mail with this simple appeal: “Hold Israel accountable to international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, article 33, which forbids the collective punishment of a civilian population.” Almost as an after-thought he added, “Please don’t let Gaza’s plight be forgotten.”
I join others saying: “End the killing. This will solve nothing and will lay the seeds for more violence. God gave us brains and hearts. Please, let’s use them to find life-giving solutions and not perpetuate a cycle of atrocities.”
- Bonnie Price Lofton is a writer in Harrisonburg and a 1994 MA graduate of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. This article originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
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I’m tired of hearing the Hamas line everytime I pick up a newspaper with either an interview or article by a pro-Palestinian activist.
Gazans have a whole section of their territory which borders Egyptian territory and it is the Egyptians who control who/what goes in and out, not Israel. if the Egyptians don’t let supplies in, blame it on the Egyptians, not Eskimos.
Israel has been sending food, oil and medicine to Gaza over the years but they are not happy when Hamas or Fatah use UN ambulances to move men and ammunition around the city (I’ve seen the films, the most recent one last week).
Most people in Gaza working for the UN are not objective observers, and many are members of Hamas or Fatah, often by their own admission. UN observers are totally useless in telling the truth about what is going on there. Seems they keep missing scores of smuggling tunnels except when one collapses underneath of them, and then not a peep of protest.
Re the little boy with cancer. As I heard the story (or one of many versions of it), he did get to go to Israel for treatment but may have died because his family kept him from proper medical treatment for so long (didn’t want any Jews helping him).
Many Palestinians get medical help in Israeli hospitals, despite the fact that one Palestinian nurse (among several others), plotted to carry out suicide bombing inside the very hospitals that they were working in. She confessed to this plot before it could be carried out. I think a suicide bomber among my colleagues would certainly cause it to be a hostile working environment (at least for the potential victims). OSHA anybody?
Oh, Hamas has only launched 9,000 rockets against the civilian population of southern Israel and this is all right, according to Bonnie Lofton, since they only killed “fewer” than 20 civilians. Ah, the crocodile tears and faked concern for humanity from this writer. It seems to me that she couldn’t care less about Jewish/Israeli or Christian or Moslem lives lost to these indiscriminately fired rockets. A hypocrite, she be, said Yoda.
Oh, and by her wacko reasoning, Israel’s “actions go beyond an eye for an eye.” Okay, let’s play her twisted games. Israel would have the right to an equivalently proportional response to each of these rockets, so the Israelis would have the right to fire and or drop 9,000 bombs and rockets/mortars on the terrorists of Hamas. Okay, I’ll take the 9,000 behind Door One. Israel hasn’t fired that many rockets or bombs yet so they have some more work to do within the borders of “proportionality” for considering a ceasefire.
Glad to hear that Lofton “was part of an extended family of Holocaust survivors” but she seems to have forgotten why they were Holocaust survivors or what the Holocaust was even about. Seems some guy named Hitler and Himmler didn’t like the Jews and decided to exterminate them wherever they found them. Adolf even wrote a book about it, something called “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle). It was all the rage in Europe during the 30′s and now it is a bestseller in Cairo, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, among other centers of learning.
Hamas is nothing but Fascism/Nazism updated. They proclaim the same goals of extermination of the Jews (there are also non-Jewish Israelis, say about 1 million Moslems, Christians, etc) as did Hitler, but nobody believed Hitler. Now people like Lofton don’t believe the avowed goals of “the minority of men known as Hamas.”
Ironically, both Hitler and his Nazi movement and Hamas were democratically elected to power. Look what Germany and the world got when the voted were counted. Bet they would love to have had a recount.
Lofton: I’m part of a Holocaust family, but we had no survivors from Hitler’s firing squads or gas chambers or ovens (Lvov, Belzec, Auschwitz).
Save your faux tears for your Nazi-lite friends. We’ve been thru this little charade before and now, 6-7 million lost lives later, we’ve learned a few things. Essentially it is, when someone says that they are going to kill you, believe them, and act accordingly. You’ll even find that this position is one of the few places in the old Testament that allows a person to kill another (as an act of self-defense).
Hamas wanted war and that is what they got. Tell them to stop using their own people (who elected them to power) as human shields, renounce their genocidal programs, and to stop trying to kill innocent civilians in Israel. Then some serious peace talks can take place. Until then:
Never Again!
The reason why Israel sealed off its side of to border Ms. Lofton is because the animals that run Hamas were sending teenaged boys over the border to blow themselves up in Israeli shopping malls. Whether they killed Israeli Jews or Israeli Arabs didn’t matter to them. The best way to save lives in a war is to the end war quickly.
I’m far from convinced that Israel’s strategy at the moment is the best way to defeat Hamas, but Hamas must be defeated for the good everyone involved. Let’s hope that the Israelis are on the right track and decapitate the Hamas leadership with this incursion.
No matter how many times the old phrase “Never Again” is trotted out to rationalize or validate current-day egregious behavior, it can’t obscure the fact that neither Israel nor none of its enemies know how to bring peace to their own region.
In only eight years we’ll be coming up on the 100-year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration which formally started the process of, as it stated in part, “…the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
That same period in history 92 years ago also brought us the other instances of the West monkeying in other Middle-Eastern affairs which lately has given us the 4,000+ American casualties in Iraq and a Middle-East still embroiled in dealing with Western power plays and interference almost a century old and counting.
As if they are running short of enemies, each side in the recent Gaza-Israel pi**ing contest apparently delight in creating more enemy martyrs and a brand new generation of zealous soldiers for the opposing side. After almost a century, it’s tradition, it’s what they’re all comfortable with, it’s what they do.
If anything needs to change in that region it’s just the saying “never again” ….which should be updated to, “Here we go again.”
I think the fact that the west has beome a zionist state has more to do with the west lack of interest in the pllight of gazans than anything else. Every one know the jews control america and that they are cause of these problems, why else would any one wanting to get into the american senate have to virtually swear allegiance to israel?