Cease-Fire/Speak Now

This looks to be one of those moments in history when speaking out becomes a moral responsibility. Bibi Netanyahu’s military operation in Gaza consists of the mass murder of civilians around the clock, day after day, and the mass scale destruction of civilian infrastructure. One million people are displaced. 6000 people are dead (edit: I wrote this yesterday; the number of Gazan dead has climbed to 7000 in the interim, DH). The landscape turns to dust and rubble. Entire family lines are disappeared. Water, gas and electricity are cut off to a 140 sq. mile area housing 2 million people. Gazans are told to abandon their homes in the north and flee south. The south is also bombed indiscriminately. The Gaza health system has collapsed. This appears to be the deliberate ethnic cleansing and mass eradication of a people. It is accompanied by genocidal rhetoric from top Netanyahu administration figures that anyone with a familiarity with history would recognize: Gazans are “human animals,” “inhuman animals,” “children of darkness.” Displaying a passive mediocrity that amounts to criminality, Joe Biden refuses to call for a cease fire and stated publicly today that we can’t really trust the body count provided by the Gaza health ministry. Unless mass public pressure forces this thing to change course, many people may be looking back in the future and wondering why they didn’t speak out as this grave crime against humanity unfolded. — DH, Chicago 10/26/23