Bittersweet homecoming to north Gaza, Al Jazeera, photo by Mohammed Saber/EPA
Whatever happens you can’t unsee the images of many thousands of people carrying their tattered existence going home to north Gaza knowing that what faces them are bodies under rubble and a tomorrow where they will be forced to leave yet again while private enterprise from the highest offices in the land thinks about eradicating pests and seaside resorts.
The question is... wherever you live... what are you going to tell your children? Will you tell them about what it means to be human; that love and empathy are calcified concepts and might makes right? Is that really what you want for them? As Andrew Mitrovica, Al Jazeera columnist said, “the final word is shame.”
As it turns out, when it comes to shame normalization of hate and fear just won’t work in the end.
A deliberate campaign of normalization by Israel, a highly militarized nation, turned into a global acceptance of genocide. Shulamit Aloni described, during a 2002 interview on Democracy Now, how shame was used to control a narrative to the world.
Aloni said, “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country (US) people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic…. and that justifies everything we do to the Palestinians. "Speaking of her country's lost morality, she said "...The occupation is killing us all."
The normalization of genocide is a blow to humanity.
Michael Hallett writes “One of the lessons I’ve learned about uncovering generational trauma is that our ancestors did everything they could, consciously and unconsciously, to hide what they were ashamed of.
Jonathan Ofir writes in Mondoweiss, "... Israelis accustomed to the perpetual shaming of Germany, are unprepared for the shame they must now confront."
Shame is not a rational matter, it is an emotional one. It is an emotional condemnation, a condemnation Israeli society is wholly unprepared, and unwilling, to confront.
Many thousands of images cannot be hidden. There will be intergenerational shame for decades; not about shaming related to the Holocaust, but the shame of Israel's genocide in Gaza that was allowed to continue unabated in the face of unimaginable suffering.
This shame will plague all of us as individuals who, with exceptions, watched genocide and turned our backs on humanity.
Siobhan Ali writes in Foreign Affairs Review, a student publication, how shame affects future generations as it is embedded in the DNA.
Without a final seeing that causes us to question why we allow genocide to happen, our DNA born of the normalization of horrific acts of war, will speak more loudly to humanity. If we fail to look at how we allowed these acts happen in our name, we will continue on a course that brings our own destruction.