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The New York Times grimly admitted in an Opinion Piece this week that sometimes genocides just work out for the genociders.
Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, writes that genocides can only end in one of two ways. “Either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them and accountability ensues.”
Given that no military force has stopped the genocide in Gaza, for Israel it looks like option 1 is an inevitability. Even with a ceasefire in place, at least 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since last October and Israel shows no signs of stopping. Six members of one family, including four children, were killed in Gaza on Tuesday by an Israeli strike.
“Israel is unlikely to face a reckoning for its actions,” he writes. He concludes that “Israel’s impunity will enable its Jewish citizens to continue to ignore the genocide, the consequences of which will be a deepening degradation of Israeli ethics and morality, erosion of the rule of law, internal police violence against the state’s Palestinian and Jewish citizens and the undermining of whatever is left of Israeli democracy. Beyond being deprived of any justice and accountability for their suffering, the Gazan victims of Israeli actions will continue to live in dire conditions, under military supervision and with very limited future prospects.”
This is hard to read, especially from The New York Times which took far too long to acknowledge the scope of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. And yet, it feels undeniable.
There is no man-made government to stop this and for that reason, most of us have had to look to the Divine to sort out what human will cannot.
I wonder, dear reader, what spiritual tradition, moral framework or understanding of justice keeps you from surrendering to despair when human power fails this completely?