On Cruelty
A Self-Sustaining Practice
This morning, I felt a sharp hunger pain, the result of my intermittent fasting. I made that choice. All I had to do to relieve that pain was turn to my refrigerator.
Women in Gaza today don’t choose to go hungry, and they get no relief from what I can only imagine is pain exponentially more severe than mine, every day. This applies as well to Palestinian men and children blocked from accessing basic survival nutrition in Gaza. They are forced to suffer the extreme and persistent pain of starvation. They must also suffer the excruciating emotional pain of watching their little children waste, suffer and die. How is it we’re allowing this to happen?
I am just one of many voices in the world -- American, Jewish, Israeli, and European -- raised against the appalling and incomprehensible cruelty of the Israeli government which is by all accounts promulgating genocide on the Palestinian people in Gaza. And for what? Retribution for the horrific attacks of October 7, 2023, is one thing. Sixty thousand dead and millions deliberately forced into starvation is genocide.
It is not antisemitic to oppose PM Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza. It is anti-cruelty, the kind of cruelty that is perpetrated and supported by governments around the world these days. The genocide in Gaza seems to serve two goals – BiBi’s intense will to stay in power and out of jail, and Donald Trump’s dreams of turning that seaside nation into a fancy resort area. For whom? They do this with essential immunity from any sense of responsibility or empathy for the enormous human suffering they cause. They have the audacity to claim they are moving Gazans to ‘better’ locations, even as they block their access to the sea… their only remaining refuge from misery. And other global leaders are ‘too polite’ to call out their outrageous lies.
As it happens, they are not alone in the world. Military and civilian governments in Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Republic of Congo are allowing or intentionally causing genocide by warfare, sexual assault and starvation. How is it we as a human community are tolerating this?
How can cruelty be considered necessary, even constructive ...in the name of what? Economic development? Prosperity...for someone? Does one unimaginably cruel act grant permission or incentive for more? And then do former victims have no choice but to become perpetrators because cruelty is all they know?
I am shocked every day by the outcries I hear from responsible media, independent organizations and everyday voices. This horrific cruelty is well known, yet it is allowed to continue. I have no idea how or why.
What I do know is that suffering isn’t isolated to the places where it happens or to the people in its grip. Suffering is a subterranean wave that reverberates through every human soul on the Planet...even the souls of the perpetrators. We all feel it; it underlies every moment we exist. I like to fantasize about the unbearable lightness we would all enjoy in our core beings if somehow the genocide stopped and starving people were pulled from the brink of slow, horrible death into the light of life regained.
There is plenty of food to feed the starving. What we lack is the will to wrest maniacal power from our callously cruel leaders. Their behavior is not that of sane humans. It is the behavior of pathology unbound.
What an outrage. Very well said.
I sadly agree.