Notable passage from
Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill & Mitchell Plitnick
Narrated by Humphrey Bower
New Press, 2021; audiobook: Kalorama, 2021.
One need not defend Hamas to recognize that the people of Gaza are living in unacceptable squalor. Yet as we have demonstrated, the United States has not merely been indifferent to the crisis in Gaza, but played an active, significant, and thoroughly bipartisan role in degrading the conditions. The Strip is still that millstone that Edward Said warned Yitzhak Rabin wanted to drop from his neck, a place that no one wants—except the Palestinian people. Yet, as many have noted, the blockade of Gaza, now in its fourteenth year, has turned the Strip into the world's largest open-air prison.
As Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi points out, the current conditions in Gaza amount to collective punishment: "It is punishment for Gaza's refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel's siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of cease-fires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted." Such collective punishment is always self-defeating. More to the point, collective punishment is a war crime. Far from convincing Gazans to blame Hamas, it makes the citizens reluctant to act against the Hamas authorities in Gaza, as many see such actions as aiding the United States and Israel in their efforts to dominate the Palestinian people.
It is undeniable that the United States has a grave responsibility to all of Israel and Palestine, and nowhere does this come into sharper relief than in Gaza. U.S. policy, including unconditional financial and diplomatic support for Israel, and American indifference have contributed greatly to the existing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. This involvement has also increased the looming possibility of this crisis devolving into a catastrophic blight, as the United Nations predicted. As we—the people of the United States—do nothing, nearly two million innocent people suffer some of the worst living conditions in the world.
Instead of trying to find a way to spare the people of Gaza, we have used them in our efforts to oust Hamas. By scape-goating Hamas, who is certainly more than worthy of intense criticism, we ignore the long history of U.S. involvement in the region by both Democratic and Republican administrations. In so doing, we lose our sense of collective responsibility for the current crisis.
The people of Gaza live in a situation much too precarious to be ignored. The end of the Gaza siege cannot be delayed until the broader question of Israeli occupation is answered. The universal values of compassion, justice, and human rights demand that the siege be ended. Decimating the Gazan economy and starving the people living there have devastated an already depressed and overcrowded area. Moreover, these actions have not improved the situation for Israelis. Americans share significantly in the blame for this situation. Our overwhelming silence is a betrayal of the noble, definitive ideals that liberals and progressives profess to hold dear.
