The West Bank, Gaza, the G-word, and Us

Months ago, we saw the film No Other Land at the Fountain Theater. Last Monday an English teacher who’d shot some of its footage was shot to death.

We liked the unique story of the film’s making, by two Palestinian and two Jewish directors, about the forced displacement of Palestinians from Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in southwest occupied West Bank. The Israelis declared that a huge swath of Palestinian farms and village was part of an Israeli military base, so that the residents were trespassers. Yeah, it reminded me of the U.S. South decades ago. The authorities weren’t marching Negroes to concentration camps, but stood by while white citizens did as they liked.

The film is deeply personal, especially in scenes where the two key directors talk about their situations. The Palestinian was born in Masafer Yatta.

It moved us. It helped humanize what’s going on there.

A similar cooperative spirit ran through our recent radio visit with Amalia Zeitlin, Las Cruces resident and symphony violinist, discussing her efforts to bring Jewish and Palestinian youth together through music in Jerusalem.

Dead is Awdaw Hataleen, father of three. The settler who shot him had been under U.S. sanction for violence against Palestinians – until Mr. Trump took office.

If I focus here on the West Bank, it’s because the slow, inexorable, illegal eviction of Palestinians from their farms and villages there has angered me longer, since well before October 7, and has been so clearly wrong. Nothing could justify the October 7 massacre and kidnappings; but earlier events can help explain.

The film won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary feature, yet couldn’t find distribution because of prejudice among the powerful.

I have Israeli friends whom I love. I do not judge them for their country’s misdeeds, as I was grateful that folks from other countries never judged me for my country’s terrible crimes. Fellow budget travelers who liked someone from the U.S. would say, “Oh, you must be Canadian.”

In December I wrote that Israel’s leading genocide scholar classed Israel’s treatment of Gazans as genocide. That bus is filling up. Just this week two Israeli human rights organizations and Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped on. Include prominent Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, who initially called Israeli actions “just war crimes.”

No one wants to say a country founded partly in response to the Holocaust is committing genocide But there are 60,000 dead, 90% of the population displaced, and 80% of medical facilities destroyed or only partially functional. Amputations have replaced limb-saving surgery. Sixty per cent of housing units are gone. Huge numbers are starving, with innumerable kids suffering malnutrition in what the U.N. calls a “worst-case famine scenario.” More than half of aid shipments have been denied, delayed, or impeded.

West Bank facts help establish motive or intent. They show on a smaller scale, over time, that Israel does not regard Palestinians and their human rights, or lives, even outside Israel proper, as worth protecting. And they predated October 7. Netanyahu has more understandable motives than Hitler did; but he’s doing the crime. So did Hutu. Reasons, but not justification. As an Israeli human rights group points out, all instances of genocide have had justifications, at least in the minds of those who committed them.

As Edmund Burke and Albert Einstein said, the world will not be destroyed by evil-doers but by regular folks standing by silently.

Ain’t that us?

                                        – 30 --

[The above column appeared Sunday, 2 August, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper's website and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[By using the G-word, I do not mean to equate Israel’s destruction of Gazans with the Nazi obliteration of Jews. Hitler, unlike Netanyahu, had not killed in battle, and had family killed by, the people he tried to destroy. Further, while I cannot agree with Netanhayu’s final solution, and believe his conduct influenced also by his desire to avoid legal consequences for his own alleged bad conduct, any reasonable person would have to agree that “How can we end the violence between Jews and Muslims and live in peace?” is an incredibly difficult question I can’t answer. No such question made sense as to the German non-Jewish people and German Jews. Without regard to apportioning blame, everyone in the nation has lost someone to hostile violence, and/or been injured, and/or killed, and many on all sides have been displaced, or lived longing for the home from which they or parents or grandparents were rudely evicted. If one said, “I want all of us to make a fresh start,” it’s not clear what that would look like or how it would be maintained as some few on each side bore grudges too deep to transcend. The Germans had no such problems with the Jews. But the effect on me is the same if I’m a starving orphan in or Jabalia or Khan Younis: I’m in shock, fear, and pain – and grieving, though I’ve harmed no one. Whether it’s because Hitler insanely blames the Jews for Germany’s defeat and depression, or Tutsis horribly took out their anger and resentment against Hutus based on years of discrimination, if you’re a suffering kid you’re a suffering kid. And it doesn’t help to know that the Belgians should or could bear some ultimate responsibility, or the British, or the allied negotiators at Versailles.