Gaza and your alcoholic father

How do you convince your alcoholic father that what is happening in Gaza is genocide? First, you could talk about how many Israelis have openly spoken about the elimination of Gaza. Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant boldly claimed "We will eliminate everything - they will regret it." Since the attacks of October 7th, genocidal rhetoric has become normalized among Israeli politicians. (https://www.newarab.com/analysis/erase-gaza-how-genocidal-rhetoric-normalised-israel). Second, you could talk about the violations of international law that followed the October 7th attack. In less than three months, more than 8,000 children and 23,000 civilians have been killed. The pace of killing has been torrid and exceptional, almost twice as many civilians have died in Gaza than in all 20 years of battle with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Steve Salaita, a philosopher and political theorist writes the following, "Certain images have become horrifyingly familiar:  throngs of refugees queuing for bread; ambulances dodging tank and machine gun fire; hospitals in disarray; once-dense neighborhoods transformed by aerial bombardment into kilometers of rubble.  We scroll through photos of men blindfolded and stripped to their underwear, lined up on the ground like antiquities in a museum courtyard.  The scrolling continues into pictures of white body bags in shallow trenches and then into videos of little girls and boys screaming trauma into the ruins of their childhood.  We are perhaps the first generation to witness genocide in real time.  History books about the horrors of the past are written every time somebody opens social media." The killing of those in Gaza has been through 2,000-pound bombs and new weapons technologies that level entire apartment buildings at a time and can burn someone through their bone in minutes.

Your alcoholic dad asks you, "Does Israel not have the right to defend itself?" and what about "Hamas?" For the last 15 years, Israel has maintained complete control over what goes in and out of Gaza. They control waters, airspace, goods, and strategic infrastructure. Many philosophers including Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig (both Jewish and not that it matters) have claimed that Gaza is the largest open-air prison in the world. Israel could have pursued many options following the attacks of Oct 7th: they could have fortified their self-defense, frozen the financial assets of Hamas leaders, and led targeted strikes on those whom they found responsible for the attack. This is what India pursued after the horrific Mumbai 26/11 attacks in 2008, where the muted Indian government response prevented a large-scale war between India and Pakistan despite the tragic deaths of innocent civilians. Instead, Israel has pursued a strategy of complete dehumanization of Palestinian civilians. Any Palestinian could be Hamas and a Palestinian child could become Hamas thereby they don't have the right to live. Israel has engaged in collective punishment of the Palestinian population by cutting off food, water, electricity, and fuel. They have bombed refugee camps, hospitals, schools, and churches. The fundamental rule of international humanitarian law is that all parties must distinguish between combatants and civilians. It is not simply enough to claim that civilians are not the target of an attack. If a Hamas commander was in a building with civilians, it is illegal to blow up the entire building. Giving your alcoholic dad an example might be useful to illustrate this point. If a Pakistani terrorist were trapped in a hotel with all of your Dad's brothers and extended family, it would not be a morally sound decision for the Indian army to blow up the entire building because a single terrorist was in that building. For a more specific article on how/why what is happening in Gaza is genocide, you can share an incisive piece written by Rabea Eghbariah in The Nation. In Eghbariah's piece, it is quite apparent that American institutions, especially legal institutions haven't grappled with the violence of settler colonialism nor have an interest in understanding it. She eloquently writes, "There is no number of Palestinian bodies that can move Western governments and institutions to “unequivocally condemn” Israel, let alone act in the present tense. When contrasted with Jewish-Israeli life—the ultimate victims of European genocidal ideologies—Palestinians stand no chance at humanization. Palestinians are rendered the contemporary “savages” of the international legal order, and Palestine becomes the frontier where the West redraws its discourse of civility and strips its domination in the most material way. Palestine is where genocide can be performed as a fight of “the civilized world” against the “enemies of civilization itself.” Indeed, a fight between the children of light” versus the children of darkness."

Ultimately, despite all the evidence you will probably not be able to convince your alcoholic dad because they might hold certain fixed viewpoints. It might be almost inconceivable to them that not all Palestinians are Hamas. They may never want to believe that Palestine has a rich history of artists, poets, scholars, engineers, and doctors. And that 50% of Palestinians are children who had nothing to do with the Hamas election in 2006. Alcoholics have an aberrant desire for death, they of course can't experience their death in a real sense, but they may enjoy seeing the death of others. Alcoholic fathers are not just religious folks but also scientists, international relations scholars, doctors, and academics who make up our vapid institutions and government agencies. They are quick to dehumanize other people based on the superiority of one's race or dogmatic viewpoint. A certain portion of the American war machine might even desire death. The narratives of deep-seated racism, resentment, anger, and frustration within that type of alcoholic father could find their expression in the Western war machine. The war machine's focus in the 21st century has been to test out new weapons on largely Muslim populations (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and now Palestine). The alcoholic father gets to decide who deserves to live. The alcoholic father gets to decide which culture is superior. The alcoholic father gets to have a moral position that some lives can be sacrificed for the "greater good". The alcoholic father gets to say that certain forms of mass murder are okay. The alcoholic father gets to say that the dispossessed are not people in the first place. In the state of US electoral politics, we see a lot of alcoholic father-type people aiding and abetting the American Military-industrial complex which uses wars to increase the coffers of the corporations it serves. It is not a surprise that Lockheed Martin (one of the largest military contractors in the world) has outperformed the S&P 500 by producing thrice the return of the index over the last twenty years. Is this the type of planet we want to leave behind for our children?