A Silent Scream

There is a silent scream stuck in my throat. It has been there for as long as I can remember. 

As a child, living two of my most formative years in immediate post-war Berlin, with forays through the rubble-strewn remains of the Third Reich, seeing block-long lines of refugees waiting for a free lunch at my mother’s kitchen door, playing with parentless children in forts we built in bombed-out lots, speaking five-year old German with no understanding of why I was somehow separate and superior, inhaling the existential trauma pregnant in the air, I absorbed the afterglow of organized evil without a protective filter.

Years later, in early adulthood, I took myself to Dachau, the first model of industrialized genocide, a 30-minute streetcar ride from the charms of downtown Munich, and the famous beer garden where the Nazi Party was born. I walked in utter silence through the soul-shattering exhibits, past the cremation ovens, unable to understand how any people, any culture, could incorporate such methodical, mechanized murder into the everyday structure of their society. They were killing people with the same kind of efficiency with which they built the world’s best cars.

I can’t say I have truly come to terms with that trauma, and the silent scream it invoked is still trapped, inchoate, uncomprehending in my chest. But it leads me, inexorably, to Gaza, where the most recent tally of civilian deaths is equally incomprehensible.

According to the Palestinian Health Authority, more than 40,000 people have been killed, mostly civilians and at least 70 percent said to be women and children. Israel disputes the total and claims at least 14,000 of the deaths are Hamas fighters. World Health Organization estimates now suggest that if the war stopped tomorrow, the residual effects of disease, hunger and injuries could drive the total death toll above 186,000. And now we learn that polio has appeared in the bombed-out squalor of Gaza. At some point numbers are just numbers. But one baby cradled dead in the arms of its bloodied mother speaks more profoundly than any number. As does the image of an Israeli teen raped and burned to death by Hamas.

So where does it end?

It has been said that violence as a way of achieving justice is both impractical and immoral. That’s because, as Gandhi never actually said but many others did, an eye for an eye ultimately makes the whole world blind. It is also impractical because, in the case of Israel, nothing in recent years has inflamed and radicalized Palestinians and Arabs as much as Israel’s disproportionate annihilation of life in Gaza. 

Tallying blame is a fool’s errand. But it is an existential fact that during the reign of Bibi Netanyahu the ruling coalition in Israel’s Knesset has had no interest and no intention of trying to implement the only viable agreement that could end the madness – a two-state solution that guarantees Palestinian self-governance and territorial integrity. Instead, the Netanyahu government has systematically encouraged and subsidized illegal settlements in the West Bank, serviced by private roads that cut Palestinians off from their olive groves, their homes, their ancestral land. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it. And now, makeshift “outposts” have sprung up by the hundreds, creating more confrontation between aggressive, radical Jewish “settlers” and the Palestinians now being chased off their own lands.

There is no easy solution to any of this, but there is one, simple, concrete step that can and should be taken to inject at least a little bit of rational justice into the mess. The United States should immediately stop all arms shipments to Israel until Netanyahu has agreed to a ceasefire. And all of us, in every forum at our disposal, should demand it happen now.