On a recent road trip, my brother read aloud a moving account of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from the book, “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation”, by David Goldfield.
In reference to a northern senator who had supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forbade any assistance to an escaped slave and required law enforcement officers to cooperate in the return of any escapee, Stowe wrote: “He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenseless child.”
Goldfield adds: “He had not realized that black people held the same sensibilities as whites. That they were people just like himself.”
In the final pages of the novel, this passage appears like a bright shooting star:
“And you, mothers of America,–you, who have learned, by the cradles of your own children, to love and feel for all mankind,–by the sacred love you bear your child; by your joy in his beautiful, spotless infancy; by the motherly pity and tenderness with which you guide his growing years; by the anxieties of his education; by the prayers you breathe for his soul’s eternal good;–I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate the child of her bosom!”
Stowe repeatedly invoked the Gospel to illuminate the collective crime that slavery was, and especially the complicity of Northerners. The Fugitive Slave Act had just compounded that complicity.
I noted in a previous post that I grew up believing Israel could do no wrong. The only thing I ever learned to play on the piano was the beginning of the theme song to the movie Exodus: “This land is mine, God gave this land to me.”
Listening to that song and watching excerpts of the 1960 blockbuster, you might think anyone who would fight against Paul Newman and his courageous comrades must indeed be the enemy of God.
In hindsight, a necessary corollary of that mindset is that Palestinians are lesser beings than Israelis. Jews comprised a small minority of the population of Palestine before Jewish immigration began in earnest early in the 20th century. For a different but very informed perspective on the founding and growth of Israel, at the expense of the majority population, I recommend Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine.
The rights and aspirations of Palestinians are every bit as valid as those of Israelis, and the unjust order Israel maintains, in which Americans remain complicit, would offend the prophets of old.
Pity the Palestinian mother who has the same affections toward her children as any other mother, but is essentially powerless to protect them under Netanyahu’s “mighty vengeance” campaign. Pity the Palestinian child who must endure the amputation of a limb without anesthesia.
As of February 28, day number 145 of that mighty vengeance, the total of confirmed Gazans killed since October 7 is 29,954. The total wounded to date is 70,325. Recently, the numbers have been considerably less than during the worst of the bombardment, but the daily average killed as of February is 207. Seventy percent are women and children. Starvation and disease could quickly send the daily average back up.
What makes these numbers and the destruction of Gaza especially horrific is that anyone who ponders the official purpose of the war–to destroy Hamas–should realize it is impossible.
This slaughter of mostly innocent Palestinians will only enrage more of the population. Is that not elementary?
Hamas leaders, aware they were not very popular in Gaza, foresaw such a disproportionate response. So why are we helping Israel oblige them?
The only way Israel can minimize the threat Hamas poses is to undermine it politically, by halting the slaughter of Gazans, commencing the re-settlement back to Israel proper of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and getting dead serious about a bona-fide Palestinian state.
The current Israeli government is probably not capable of this, but we need to pull the plug on this war just the same, by freezing military assistance to Israel.
That would probably be the quickest way to defuse things with Iran and its proxies as well.
Get Real with Israel 