That’s awesome you went to a protest. It sounded like a full day trip and exhausting, but at the same time heartening and refreshing to see some many peaceful people come out to march for the recognition of the humanity of the trapped and suffering good people of Gaza. I had just read yesterday, last year, that now all of the people are homeless, 2.1 million. It’s really hard to fathom all the people in Gaza are living in tents while the bombs continue demolishing their buildings. It’s hard to fathom that under such a crisis their Muslim neighbors in Egypt and Jordan won’t extent a hand to open he boarders to let the women and children live on the other side, even temporarily in tents, just to escape being targeted by the bombing.
Then again is it really even about religion? As you point out with the Houthis in Yemen, the scale of which I was unaware of, that the “two sides” that are at war are Saudi Arabia and Yemen, both Muslims. Credulity doesn’t have a religion; it only operates under the cover of one. The Iranians are supply missiles and weapons to the Houthis and the Americans to the Saudis, just to have continued provocation, continual proxy war, not out of any good sense of religion, but to provoke and destroy. The 13 million Houthis are now joined by the 2.1 million Gazans in expanding the humanitarian Crisis. But it’s not a humanitarian crisis really, is it? It’s a religious crisis.
Because religions don’t recognize the “other,” only see them “heathens.” See see the suffering of the “other,” instead of the “heathen,” you have get to beyond religion to imagine the suffering a child on either “side” is going through in the moment, in the tents, of the crying mother who lost her child to a bomb, under rubble. When you can concentrate on just one individual in your imagination for just two minutes trapped in the suffering, you don’t see religion. But humanity. Religion blocks the full extent of an other’s humanity from being recognized because of the instant labelling of the “other.” That is actually why non-violence worked for Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. Mandela. Because they suffered under a vast disproportionality of force and could not militarily win. Fighting at the point in their battle only justified further physical military attacks by the dominant force. If Hamas gave up firing weapons, right now, there would be no reason in the mind of outside the conflict to see why Israel keeps bombing. The vast suffering will be the only thing visible and the continued destruction of Gaza. The world will see the damage, demand it to stop, and when it does stop the Isrealis will be seen for a long time as destructive and inhuman. But if Hamas (or the Houthis) at this point keep firing back, as they stand no chance of militarily winning, they only justify in the minds of the “west” the continued slaughter by Israel.
The Holocaust is only the Holocaust because it was captured on film, then in books and articles, and continually presented over the following decade as the depravity it was. It didn’t just killed Jews, though they were the principle target, but LBGTQI+, Romanis, and any other “other” found that was not a POW. The strategy of Hamas is understandable and stems from a deep sense of injustice in living in a caged city not of their own choosing, a Warsaw or Krakow ghetto as the “Jewish” scholar and Masha Genshin, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, recently stated in the US prominent New Yorker Magazine article “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” For that comparison of Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto, she was banned by a white German politician from openly accepting a peace prize but went to Germany to take it from the group that awarded it her under scaled back conditions. The irony of that white male German politician castigating her for making a comparison didn’t escape her—a white male German lecturing to her, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and Jew and fierce critic of power—to effectively shut up, that you can compare the Krakow or Warsaw Ghettos to Gaza as a fenced in concentration camp being bombed to oblivion.
At any rate, thanks for sharing your instigations for justice and happy new year!