by Steve Babb

Imagine that you are an 18-year-old in a tiny, densely populated enclave of two million people, half of them children, three quarters of them refugees or descendants of refugees, all of them stateless, besieged, blockaded, and constantly surveilled and policed.
You have grown up in a ghetto the size of Grenada knowing you will never be allowed to leave.
Yet you are more than victims. That ghetto, which has one of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty in the world, also has one of the world’s highest literacy rates, and punches way over its weight in producing poets and artists.
Israeli bureaucrats have been monitoring and tapering down your calories, subjecting you to periodic electricity blackouts, and sharply restricting the food, medicine, medical supplies, and other goods available to you for your entire life, since well before October 7th.
You have been subjected to five bloody full-scale Israeli invasions before the current one, plus multiple “lawn mowings.” Your attempts at mounting nonviolent protests have been brutally suppressed.
You were not living in a “ceasefire” on October 6^th. You were living under siege, under a collective punishment regime, in a perpetual state of suspension waiting for your real life to start.
You weren’t allowed to visit West Bank relatives, and nobody except Israeli soldiers were allowed to visit you. They had been brainwashed to believe that you were human animals, and treated you accordingly.

Your life was hell on October 6^th, and nobody gave a damn.
Then overnight your situation got exponentially worse.

Now your ghetto has become the world’s deadliest place to be a journalist, a doctor, an aid worker, a poet, a refugee, a pregnant woman, or a child.

The genocide taking place there has generated the most intense man-made famine since World War Two, a record number of child amputees, and a chilling new acronym – WCNSF, short for “Wounded Child-No Surviving Family.”

Your ghetto has become a 24/7 free-fire zone with no escape hatches where nowhere and no one is safe which has been subjected to the equivalent of seven Hiroshimas.

An average of fifty children have been killed in your ghetto daily for the past 700 days – over 400 for every Israeli child who was killed on October 7^th.

Your children aren’t collateral damage or human shields – they are the intentional targets, along with the homes, infrastructure, and cultural institutions which sustain them, preserve their heritage, define their identity, and give their lives meaning.

Your hospitals, clinics, ambulances, schools, and universities have been systematically demolished, and your top surgeons and hospital administrators have been assassinated or are dying tortuous deaths in Israeli black sites.

Everyone you know has been forcibly displaced, most too many times for them to count.

You have no homes to go back to – your homes are craters.

You have no families to go back to – your families are scattered, decimated, or erased.

Whole family trees have been wiped off the registers.

Thousands of men, women, and children have simply disappeared – buried under the fifty million tons of rubble, stashed in a mass grave, or held indefinitely in a Gulag.

Tens of thousands of bodies are decomposing under the rubble piles. In some cases, their loved ones know they are there. In other cases, they are left in limbo.

Nine in ten ghetto children believe their death is near, and half wish it had arrived.

The recent “ceasefire” includes no provisions for holding the perpetrators accountable legally, morally, or financially, instead going out of its way to ensure their impunity.

Israeli leaders who made hundreds of explicit public statements of genocidal intent and incitement, along with the soldiers who acted on these statements, will get off scot-free.

We are told that the ghetto must be “demilitarized,” “deradicalized,” and “reformed,” but these injunctions are only directed against one side – the side with no air force, air defense system, airports, Iron Dome, or bunker buster bombs.

Nor does the ceasefire contain any provisions for caring for the hundreds of thousands of children who have been grievously wounded, maimed, burnt, disabled, starved, and sickened by the genocide and who have lost limbs, parents, and entire families. With every health care facility in the ghetto destroyed and its medical corps decapitated, where are they to turn? We aren’t even allowing pediatric double amputees and burn victims to get medical care here. Are we simply going to wash our hands of them?

Israel, which unilaterally terminated the last ceasefire in a hail of bombs, has already racked up multiple ceasefire violations. It continues to bomb and shoot civilians at will in unmarked kill zones. It has refused to release many detainees it had promised to, or else deported them instead, and continues to withhold desperately needed food supplies and humanitarian aid.

The released detainees’ accounts of their ordeals are horrific.

The Israeli hostages are free, but the two million inhabitants of your unlawfully occupied ghetto continue to be held hostage.

Somehow, their suffering doesn’t register. Perhaps they aren’t photogenic or white enough to make the cut, or the atrocities perpetrated on them don’t fit the approved narrative.  

With the “ceasefire” in place, our mainstream news media, which has been giving the genocide perfunctory, one-sided coverage as it is, will quickly go back to ignoring it completely.

But the genocide won’t end.

On the contrary — the less attention we pay to it, the worse it gets.

As you have guessed by now, the ghetto I’m referring to is Gaza.

My point is this:

If any other country were doing this to any other children in the world, we would never let them get away with it.

I have to ask: what is wrong with us?

Where has our moral clarity and our sense of empathy gone?

Do we believe, like our Vice President, that our ethical obligations end at the boundaries of our families, our tribe, our team, or our country?

Do we believe that we can let our government kill brown children abroad en masse in our name and on our dime without taking any accountability for the ensuing carnage?

Where have our UU principles gone?

Does our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being somehow not apply to Palestinian children?

Where has our proud UU tradition of standing with the oppressed regardless of their skin pigment or creed or the clout of their lobbyists gone?

Where has the spirit of Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb gone?

Gazans risk their lives every single day to scavenge for food and firewood to keep their families alive.

They don’t have the luxury of choice. We do.

Our moral obligation to confront and end the Gaza genocide is even more profound and urgent because we are directly implicated in it.

We are Israel’s closet ally, largest arms supplier, and its chief source of diplomatic, political, and legal cover. We have green-lighted, enabled, cheered on, and laundered its genocide in Gaza from day one. We could have stopped it overnight at any point by simply telling Israel that it won’t get any more of our bombs until it stops slaughtering and starving Gaza children.

Our fingerprints are all over the Gaza genocide. We autograph the bombs that have the Gaza children’s names on them. We defunded and dismantled the agency that fed, educated, and protected them while they were starving.

The International Court of Justice just ruled that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza children and that it needs to stop. Bibi and Trump have already signaled that they will defy this ruling, as they have all the ICJ’s previous rulings on the Gaza genocide.

Our silence in the face of the Gaza children’s Calvary is deafening and disgraceful. It’s unworthy of us. We need to do better.

The Gaza children are counting on us. We have let them down. That has to stop now, before it’s too late. We can start by educating ourselves, and breaking through the barrier of dehumanization, Islamophobia, and hasbara. A good place to start is attending the monthly pilgrimages of the Atlanta Multifaith Coalition for Palestine, which are held the first Saturday of every month. These are walking vigils with an educational component, rather than protests. They offer a unique chance to learn, reflect, and meet folks from many faith traditions who are already involved. They are the single most therapeutic and affirming thing I do every month – a chance to walk a couple of miles with scores of other people of conscience who believe that Palestinians are human beings. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to give it a try.

Read here the 2024 Action of Immediate Witness: Solidarity with Palestinians, adopted by the UUA. It includes a detailed statement of solidarity and a list of actions we all can take in support of their liberation.