In Gaza or the Golan Heights, a Dead Child Is a Dead Child

When was our humanity divided along partisan lines?

Here, I'll give you an example of what I mean. A rocket was fired from Lebanon in late July. It struck a soccer field in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. And it killed 12 children.

Right-wing media—including Fox News—immediately erupted. Red-faced pundits spent hours lambasting the atrocity as a heinous war crime—which I agree with. Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and all the other partisan media entities decrying the wrongful deaths of those 12 children on July 27 are right.

If we cannot agree that the murder of a child—whether by an Islamic militant or by a politician in a suit and tie—is evil, period, then our moral compass has been rendered useless.

What's odd, however, is that they only seem outraged by self-serving political narratives. Where was their rage the last 10 months, as piles of young Palestinian corpses have been stacked thousands high? It begs the question: Does the murder of children only anger us when it suits our neatly defined, partisan worldviews?

Only the willfully ignorant have been spared the horrific imagery of modern Gaza the rest of us have seen: charred and mangled limbs sprouting from heaps of rubble; the ashen-white, limp bodies of lifeless children; and the soul-torturing wails of a weeping mother or father.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty cronies aren't being too subtle about their motivations either. See, this isn't just a war against Hamas. This is a war against the Palestinian people as a whole. And those aren't my words. Those are theirs.

"I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed (...) We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

-Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense

"Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated.”

-Yoav Kisch, Education Minister

"I don't care about Gaza. I literally don't care at all. They can go out and swim in the sea. I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around Gaza."

-May Golan, Minister of Social Equality

"The majority of the 12,000 dead Palestinians were terrorists. [...] Good riddance.”

-Yair Lapid, Leader of the Opposition

"The war will never end if we don't expel them all.”

-Nissim Vaturi, Member of the Israeli Knesset

"It is not Hamas that should be eliminated. Gaza should be razed and Israel's rule should be restored to the place. This is our country."

-Moshe Feiglin, Former Member of the Israeli Knesset

"The fighting will continue and expand to any place necessary in the Gaza strip. There will be no sanctuary cities.”

-Benny Gantz, Former Minister of Defense

"One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray and hope for [the hostages'] return, but there is also a price in war.”

-Amichai Eliyahu, Minister of Heritage

"We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness... we shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah."

-Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister

Not a great look, guys. Especially given that every aforementioned quote came from the tongues of Israeli leaders, the very people whose hands are on the levers of power. The rhetoric is damning, and precisely why South Africa (a country that knows all too well what apartheid looks like) levied a genocide case against Israel, and why the International Criminal Court prosecutor's office has requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and three Hamas leaders.

Thousands of Palestinians have been murdered. Many more are maimed and starving. Meanwhile, the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports that Israel is running "a network of torture camps."Palestinian prisoners, many detained unjustly, allege they've been raped, sometimes with objects, and sometimes by even female soldiers.

Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, just recently said, "No one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.”

Put together, the evidence creates a macabre mosaic that is most aptly described in one word: genocide. Indeed, this is an extermination campaign, and one that my government is enabling. (Since October 7, 2023, the U.S. has enacted legislation providing more than $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel).

As Americans, I wanted to think we'd rally, together, against a state-sponsored extermination campaign that we are funding. Though I was wrong. Even today, as Gaza has become a slaughterhouse, so-called intellectuals—even self-described liberals like Bill Maher and Bari Weiss—are unable to see the Israeli government for what it is: a gaggle of bloodthirsty politicians using American dollars to systematically murder innocent Palestinians.

Earnest criticism of rape, concentration camps, and genocide is not antisemitic. A government cannot be inoculated from scrutiny with identity politics. Don't be fooled: Criticizing Israel's shameful war is not Jewish hate by default. Those who say it is are intellectually dishonest and moral cowards.

It is a shame that many of us can stomach the murder of innocents so long as it behooves our political tribalism. Of course I condemn Hamas. But we're well past the point of condemning Hamas as a prerequisite for criticizing Netanyahu. As an American, if I criticize the Bush administration's nonsensical war in Iraq, I am not first asked to denounce al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. None of my fellow Americans assume that, when I criticize Dick Cheney, the Iraq war, and the White House's lies about weapons of mass destruction, that I am an apologist for Osama bin Laden or that I approve of the deaths of my fellow countrymen on September 11, 2001.

No longer can America lay claim to the idea that we don't negotiate with terrorists. Because on July 24, a terrorist by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu walked into our capital, castigated Americans critical of his war as "idiots,"and was applauded.

I am worried about the soul of America. If we cannot agree that the murder of a child—whether by an Islamic militant or by a politician in a suit and tie—is evil, period, then our moral compass has been rendered useless. If we are more outraged by the students protesting genocide than the genocide itself, we have not only failed the Palestinians, but we've failed Israel. But worst of all, we've failed ourselves. Partisan schisms have sterilized our hearts, I'm afraid. And it's why the term never again is happening again.

I didn't understand this as a boy. Because when I was young, I simply couldn't wrap my mind around how and why the world could allow evil things to happen. Now, I think, I know.