“‘What is this madness?’”
A letter from Gaza.
7 JULY—I received a note the other day that I think it is imperative my readers see for the shocking realities it describes. The email message arrived from Mazin Qumsiyeh. Some of you may recognize Mazin’s name from the two-part series published earlier this year about the environmental destruction Zionism has inflicted on the land of Palestine: “Scars on the land,” and “An imagined reality.” Qumsiyeh is director of the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University. He is also an unflagging activist for his land and people. I hold him in high regard for all of his work.
I’ve been on Mazin’s extensive listserv for over a year. The email I publish below arrived from him on 2 July. It was written by a man named Omar, who wrote to Mazin from Gaza, where he is caring for a group of 22 people as they try to survive starvation and continuous bombing. Among all else it conveys, Omar’s email documents a heinous crime committed by Americans working at one of the food distribution sites.
I am also moved, as I am sure readers will be, by Omar’s description of his daily life, his hour-to-hour life, reduced to brutal bare existence, and for the way Omar confronts us—we Americans above all others—with our responsibility to act.
I share Omar’s letter with permission.
—C.M.
Omar.
Perhaps tonight is the last night I write to you. I hope it isn’t the last—or maybe it’s better if I don’t hope at all.
This soul is weary; it craves peace. The tanks are near. Their roar sits heavy in my lap, rattling this exhausted body. Gunfire crackles without end, everywhere. The grinding of treads devours what little memory remains—I hear it so clearly, crushing my dreams. My dreams! What a hollow word. I don’t even know how it slipped through my fingers. A burst of bullets—first, second, third… Dear God, what is this madness?!
My hand trembles again as Ahmed, my nephew, crouches like a hunted thing, clinging to his grandmother. Fear gnaws at him, crouching over his small body like a predator savoring its prey. Children are easy meat for terror. The tanks roll closer. The wail of ambulances swells. And I wonder: Will another image emerge? A man burning, his body torn open, while the world feasts on his agony—only to forget him in two days?
Has our suffering become a stepping stone for others’ success? I don’t know if morning will come. Not tomorrow’s dawn—but the dawn of the sky, when my soul rises to a place wrapped in peace, where love flocks like doves. A place untouched by this screaming violence.
The price of sugar in Gaza is extremely high, and the Americans involved in the American aid know this very well. What happened today is one of the worst crimes ever committed. Read carefully what I’m about to say:
As soon as the first wave of American aid arrives, people rush to get sugar first. Today, the Americans deliberately placed the sugar in a separate area. Then, they dug a deep pit just before the sugar zone, covered it with nylon, and lightly sprinkled it with dirt so that no one would see it or notice. The starving reached the sugar first, and seven people fell into the pit. Then a bulldozer came and buried them alive. Meanwhile, a man in his fifties was returning from the aid area, nearly collapsing. I held him, and he said to me: “I’d rather die of hunger than go back to that aid—it’s aid of death.”
Omar’s letter ends here.
All that Omar wrote in his email to Mazin stands as a condemnation of the United States—an indictment of the gravest magnitude. America and specific Americans—two presidents and their administrations among them—are complicit in the very worst crimes against humanity.
America alone is the country that could have prevented, and subsequently stopped, this genocide but that instead armed and funded it against the wishes of a majority of its own citizens. The two questions each of us need consider are these: What am I doing to stop it? And is it enough?
Published simultaneously in Winter Wheat, and West Bank Alerts.
The story of the concealed pit is violently disgusting confirmation that the barbarity of our evil pustulant cancer of a government's appalling barbarity trickles down to the odious cretins who do its will on the ground, alongside and aiding the Nazi Israeli einsatzgruppen in their unspeakable murder of an entire people. This can never be atoned for and must, when some sanity takes hold, be burned away by the mortal suffering of the responsible.
This is pure sadism, not humanitarian aid!