DEAR EDITOR:

Some years ago, I was watching a World War II documentary with a family member. On screen, emaciated German Jews were being beaten and driven like cattle by their Nazi captors. This family member turned to me and asked “How can human beings treat each other like that?” I just shook my head, but my unspoken thought was that we are not so far removed from history, that many people today would not only look the other way but actively participate in such atrocities, that such cruelty is latent in human nature and must be consciously guarded against.

The great Irish novelist James Joyce put it succinctly when he wrote “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” In fact, too many of us are still asleep, but what is happening in Gaza is no bad dream. In a dark mirror of history, the state of Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust, is now committing a genocide against the captive Palestinian population of the neighboring Gaza Strip. The question I would like to pose is this: Is our country, which once fought heroically to stop a genocide, now sleepwalking into supporting one?

The International Court of Justice has declared Israel’s assault on Gaza a plausible genocide, a conclusion also now supported by the Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel. For over a year, the world has witnessed Israel’s bombing of hospitals, targeted killing of journalists and first responders and indiscriminate killing and maiming of civilians, including tens of thousands of children. Now scenes of famine, caused by Israel’s blockade, are being seen in the international media, as more and more countries and leaders around the world are speaking out against Israel’s actions.

Despite all this, the U.S. government has for years been sending the nuclear-armed state of Israel, with the most advanced and sophisticated military in the region, billions of dollars in defensive aid and weaponry in regular installments. This makes us complicit. As a self-governing people, we have the right and the responsibility to determine the nature of our foreign policy through our elected representatives, and that includes stopping atrocities. Now is the time to exercise that right and say to Congress and to the government of Israel: No more, and never again.

WILLIAM HARNED

Niles