Rant

My father had favorite sayings, perhaps picked up in his own family when he was growing up. Two, related, were “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” and “Sweep around your own back doorstep before you sweep around your neighbor’s.” We heard those often enough that my brother and sister may remember them with varying degrees of fondness or distaste.

Even though I’m not into sayings, proverbs, shibboleths, these do come to mind as I look aghast at the military actions of our friend and ally Israel and, as I start to condemn Israel, remember My Lai and our own devastation of humanity in Afghanistan and Iraq. People who live in glass houses -- and -- sweep around your own back doorstep -- . My recollection of international law is that it is illegal, criminal, to attack sites where civilians, men, women and children, are known to be taking refuge even if enemy forces are known to be there. Israel has done this repeatedly in the current war on Hamas, slaughtering innocents who will have included both Muslims and Christians -- including perhaps members of our own Episcopal Church, as the Anglican Communion has a strong presence and ministry in Gaza, especially in health and medical care.

That Hamas is so contemptible as to make shields of the civilian population and should be eradicated from Gaza for their failure to put the wellbeing of their people first priority, does not excuse Israel from criminal liability – which, because they are the power, will never be prosecuted just as the American administrations, government and people who ignited, funded and prosecuted our Iraq war will never be brought to justice except in the annals of history. Failure to prosecute obvious war crimes and crimes against humanity is itself immoral and reprehensible, complicit; and should itself be actionable.

And now to hear the arrogance of Bibi, himself now a war criminal, and though he is right that the Hamas threat must be removed, railing that the United States better not ever again try to second guess him on Gaza, is beyond the pale. With his unrestrainable lobby and puppets in our Congress and government, he may prevail; but it should be clear to any but the dimmest that while we the American taxpayers are Israel’s funding source and ally, Israel is no one’s ally but its own chip on shoulder self. The gall of saying send money and weapons and fund our atrocities but shut up, keep your mouth shut, is brass as contemptible as his attempt to insert himself in our most recent presidential election. At least our government is now, at least for the moment until the lobby puts a stop to it with screaming and shouting and political threats and demands for apology, having the politically incorrect guts to speak out against IDF criminal atrocities.

Fools insist that Israel today is the reincarnation of the ancient Israelite invaders who under Joshua and successors never succeeded in subduing Canaan. Or maybe, for anyone who has read that Heilsgeschichte with its unspeakable atrocities, Israel is precisely that. The devotion of non-Jewish Americans to Israel seems to embrace that notion, but is, like Europe after WW2, also a salving of conscience about the Holocaust, which we observed firsthand at the fall of the Third Reich. If a Jewish nation was to be created, in the settlement after the war, the offending homeland of the Nazis should have been depopulated, then repopulated as Israel instead of moving Palestinians into the permanent refugee status of concentration camp inmates and giving their homeland away as Israel. With the magnitude of the war horror, that would have been proper justice and war reparations.

That didn’t happen and with the Soviet greed may not have been possible, and now is irrelevant in any event. But in the nearly 70 years since that injustice was perpetrated on the Palestinian people, there has been time for all the world to assimilate and do justice to the Palestinian people at least to the extent local government tries to do right by those who are displaced by the exercise of eminent domain. That we the world have not done so, have not done good but have perpetuated evil, is the cause of the current horrors. That the other Arab nations of the MiddleEast would not open their hearts to Palestinians is reprehensible and complicit in today's nightmare. Israel in particular has been less than gracious and grateful in treatment of their displaced and concentrated neighbors, fomenting hatred and violent vengeance that will be sacrificing and slaughtering innocents long after anyone alive today is dead and gone and from some hereafter ruefully looking down, or up.

Meanwhile, horror continues to expand across the Fertile Crescent, thanks in large measure to the unprosecuted war crimes of another bully nation. It is a lesson of history that the biggest guy is answerable to no one.

TW