One Year of Unspeakable Loss
PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 7 Oct 2024
Jewish Voice for Peace - TRANSCEND Media Service
7 Oct 2024
After a year of genocide against Palestinians, Israel is waging a campaign of terror and destruction that has brought the entire region ever closer to a state of all-out war.
Following the Israeli government’s decimation, ethnic cleansing, and ground invasion into south Lebanon, the Iranian government yesterday launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel. This ongoing escalation brings us even closer to a devastating war across the region that makes every single person less safe.
A year of impunity for Israeli genocide has landed us here. The U.S. government’s refusal to impose any consequences for Israel’s crimes against humanity has meant that the Israeli government feels it has free rein to keep escalating and expanding its destruction. This week, Israel bombed Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen in a single day.
This latest escalated assault has already displaced approximately one million people in Lebanon, and risks killing even more men, women, and children. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to back this catastrophe.
A year of genocide got us here.
For all of us grieving loved ones, the losses of the last year are unbearable.
As Jews, we have an unshakeable belief that each of us was created b’tselem elohim, in the image of G-d, and that every person is a whole world. Each of the thousands upon thousands of lives lost was an entire universe destroyed.
It is because of this knowledge, that every single life is precious, that we have mourned every single life lost over the past year — Palestinian, Lebanese, and Israeli. And it is because of this knowledge that we have fought at every turn against the efforts of the Israeli and U.S. governments to turn Jewish grief into a justification for genocide.
Since last October, Israel has murdered more than 41,000 Palestinians, with thousands more buried under the rubble. It is intentionally starving and trying to eradicate an entire people. More than 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by the Israeli military, held in prison camps where they are being sexually, physically, and psychologically tortured. The Israeli military’s calculated destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, food, and clean water supply has made daily life unlivable, with these slower forms of genocide projected to claim as many as 200,000 lives. And the Israeli government has made clear its utter disregard too for the safety of Israeli hostages in Gaza, whom it has recklessly endangered while using their families for political propaganda.
For a year, we have watched as Palestinians in Gaza livestream this genocide, documenting every horror and war crime that the Israeli military inflicts — from the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps and hospitals, to starvation, to the spread of eradicated diseases like polio.
Over and over, we bear witness to the lifeless bodies of children pulled from the rubble, to the craters that are left behind when U.S.-made bombs obliterate families in their tents. And we watch as the Israeli and U.S. governments claim to be carrying out this horror in our names.
Before October 7, 76 years of violence and apartheid.
Every human life is precious. We mourned the loss of the civilians killed in the Hamas attacks of October 7. We follow an international rights framework for a just and safe future for all, and believe that the killing of civilians, no matter by who, is always unacceptable. And despite what leaders in both the Israeli and U.S. governments would try to have you believe, the clock did not start on October 7. Nor did it stop then.
Before October of last year, 2023 was already one of the most deadly years for Palestinians on record. The most right-wing government in Israeli history was encouraging and enabling increased vigilante settler attacks against Palestinians across the West Bank and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands, destroying Palestinian homes, and detaining and extrajudicially killing Palestinians. Gaza was already an open-air prison, suffocating under Israel’s illegal 17-year blockade that severely restricted food, water, electricity, medical supplies, and other necessities from entering.
The violence of this year follows 76 years of systemic oppression and dehumanization of Palestinians. There has never been a state of Israel which did not remove Palestinians from their homes, claim their land, and violently enforce Jewish supremacy.
Never again can we allow a regime of ethnic supremacy to turn dehumanization into violence into genocide into an expansionist, devastating war. We believe that never again means never again — for anyone. Never Again means end the genocide, end the impunity, end the bombs. Never Again is right now.
No more bombs to Israel.
The Israeli ethno-state, advertised as a guarantee of Jewish safety, provides no true safety for anyone. Decades of colonization and oppression terrorizes Palestinians and compels Jewish Israelis to carry out this violence of occupation. We are fighting for a future of real safety rooted in justice, equality, freedom and dignity for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.
We have fought to stop the U.S. government from sending billions to arm this mass extermination. We’ve joined the rest of the world to rise up not only to call for an end to Israel’s genocide, but for Palestinian liberation, recognizing that our struggles against oppression are interlinked.
As anti-Zionist Jews, we know that this genocide is not an aberration of Israeli policy, but the result of the political logic of Zionism: an expansionist project seeking the maximum amount of land for Israel through cleansing Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, and willing to commit unimaginable horrors achieve this goal.
There is no question of what needs to be done. For an entire year, the Biden administration could have ended this genocide: they simply needed to stop sending bombs to Israel. As Israel extends its war of extermination from Gaza to Lebanon, the Biden administration’s ongoing arming and funding of the Israeli military is indefensible.
The U.S. must stop arming Israel. Now!
Tags: Arms Industry, Bullying, Gaza, Genocide, Hamas, Hezbollah, IDF, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestine, State Terrorism, Syria, USA, Warfare, West Bank, Yemen, Zionism
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