On May 5,2025, Israel announced plans to invade and seize the entirety of the Gaza Strip. This comes as no food has entered the region in more than 8 weeks, and food supplies have almost completely ran out. In order to prepare for the invasion, timeline still unannounced, Israel has called upon reserve soldiers. There is no indication that Israel intends on leaving the Gaza Strip once occupied. Leading figures in Israeli politics have called for “the total destruction of Gaza.” An influential news figure in Israeli television said “I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers… or train cars… and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza” the other day. International outrage is nowhere to be heard, except by a few regional, nongovernmental militaries in the area.
This blatant act of violence, after over a year of constant bombardment on the most heavily populated region on earth, whose population is 50% children, has been met with no pushback. It has been accepted as a necessary step in an attempt to free the hostages and eliminate Hamas. It does not matter that 61,000 people have been killed, 17,000 being children and over 14,000 presumed dead. It does not matter that an entire population of 2 million people face starvation, as all the farms have been bombed and no food has been allowed to enter. In fact, they bombed a ship from Europe that was delivering aid to Gaza just the other week, while still in European waters. It seems like it does not matter what Israel does in the name of its “righteous war against terrorism”; there will never be international pushback.
In early April, a 14 year old American boy named Amer was picking olives with his friends in the West Bank of Palestine. He was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. This is the fifth death of an American citizen at the hands of the Israeli military since October 7, 2023.
Can you imagine if five American civilians were killed by the Chinese military for picking fruit at night, in five separate incidents? If they were killed by Cuba or Mexico or North Korea? The outrage would be enormous, and rightfully so. There has been no pressure by the federal government to punish or treat Israel differently because of these deaths. In the West Bank, like Gaza, they are allowed to act with total impunity. These people’s lives are not worth more because they are American citizens. It should not matter at all. But if the US government allows its own citizens to be killed by an army who should not even be in the territory the boy was killed, it must be asked…what can’t they do?
The people of Palestine have been subjected for decades to nightmarish conditions. In the West Bank, they face a different set of laws, rules and courts. Nightly raids into villages and attacks by illegal settlers often leave families splintered by arrests or death. In Gaza, they have been the victims of routine bombing of civilian areas, a method which the Israeli Government calls “mowing the lawn.” Now, after October 7, these attacks and conditions have intensified indescribably. When it’s protested, students are arrested. When spoken out against, you are lambasted as a supporter of fundamentalist terrorism. But I beg the question: how can anyone who sees this horrific violence in Gaza that has claimed thousands and thousands of lives, the violence in the West Bank that leaves teenagers picking olives dead, not call it out as disgusting and evil?
There needs to be an attitude shift in the US, and around the world. The notion that it is in any way wrong to call a spade a spade, especially when it comes to the death of innocent civilians, needs to be completely done away with. There needs to be intense pressure on the government of the US to stop turning their cheek to wanton destruction on behalf of Israel. The global community needs to condemn and act against the destructive genocide of the Palestinian people. In any other situation, or if the roles were reversed, it rightfully would be punished. The time is now that this situation, this power dynamic, is also rightfully punished by the global community.
