I Had a Dream: From Vietnam to Gaza
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Israel has reached an unimaginable peak of evil. And indeed many people all over the world find it hard to imagine that this is so. …The only possible conclusion must be that Israeli evil has nothing to do with Judaism and that what is manifested in Israeli behavior is not Jewishness. It is pure colonialist, nationalist and chauvinistic racism and should be treated as such.
–Nurit Peled-Elhanan at the Closing Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, March 17, 2013
I recently had a horrific dream that transported me from the safety and peace of Vietnam to the blazing hell on earth that is Gaza. I was holding a sniper rifle and in my sights was an IDF soldier. There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that I would have pulled the trigger had the dream not ended. While I’m a great supporter of non-violence, I also firmly believe in the right of self-defense, including in Gaza where Israel is the invader and a fanatical agent of genocide.
My nightmare was a visceral manifestation that this Israeli-conceived and -executed genocide weighs heavily on my mind, is embedded in my subconscious, and can even rear its ugly, bloodstained head in my dreams. It embodies the powerlessness I feel but also the anger, frustration, and sadness. I wake up thinking about this moral stain and go to bed doing the same. But, alas, there are also glimmers of hope, a lesson history has taught me.
In her recent PEN Pinter Prize 2024 acceptance speech, “No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine,” Arundhati Roy stated the obvious for those with eyes to see and ears to hear: “Israel is not fighting a war of self-defense. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.” She forcefully and eloquently dispenses with the perverse notion so many who “stand with Israel” embrace that genocide, torture, and land grabbing are a form of self-defense.
This, of course, is official Israel’s party line. In his October 7, 2024 Address at the State Ceremony to Mark One Year since the October 7 Massacre, Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “We rallied together to defend our country, our homeland. We mustered immense mental strength. We outlined the goals of the war and we are achieving them: toppling the rule of Hamas; bringing all the hostages home, the living and the deceased alike—this is a sacred mission and we will not stop until we complete it; eliminating any future threat from Gaza to Israel; and returning the residents of the south and the north safely to their homes.” Sounding very much like his primary benefactor in Washington, D.C. with its “city upon a hill” sense of cultural superiority and exceptionalism, he referred to Israelis as “the Eternal People. A people that fights to bring light to this world, that aspires to spread good and eradicate evil. ‘A people that rises like a lion, leaps up like a lion’.”
Back to the cold, bloody reality. Amos Goldberg, the Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-editor with Bashir Bashir of The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press 2018), writes that
What is happening in Gaza is a genocide, in my opinion, because the level and pace of indiscriminate killing, destruction, mass expulsion, displacement, deliberate famine, executions, the wiping out of universities, cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanization of the Palestinians create an overall picture of genocide, of the intentional and conscious shattering of Palestinian existence in Gaza. Palestinian Gaza, as a geographical, political, cultural, and human entity no longer exists. Genocide is the deliberate destruction of a collective or part of it, not of all of its individual members – and that is what is happening in Gaza today.
During a summer visit to Philadelphia, I regularly walked by a home in my temporary neighborhood that had large posters in its window that screamed, “We Stand With Israel” and “Philly Stands with Israel.” Almost immediately, as if on autopilot my mind began to sketch out an essay in the spirit of writing as therapy, a more productive and therapeutic response than throwing rocks through the window, something my angry alter ago was insisting I do, instant yet counterproductive and illegal gratification.
In a blog post I proclaimed that I stand with “the exploited, weak, oppressed, and victims of state-sponsored violence, including genocide, NOT the oppressors, exploiters, and murderers. It’s really that simple. That black and white. There are no gray areas. There is no moral equivalence here.” It’s a grotesque of the times that this commonsensical and moral position is branded as controversial and to oppose the genocidal actions of Israel is to be antisemitic.
My interior dialogue with a friend who has swallowed the line about “toppling the rule of Hamas; bringing all the hostages home” and “eliminating any future threat from Gaza to Israel,” I continued: “What Hamas did last year was barbaric but the 2.1 million people living in Gaza are not Hamas. The attack merely created an opportunity for Israel and the IDF to shorten the long game, a modern-day version of the desire for Lebensraum.
There’s a lot of talk about taking sides, especially in the US, a country whose citizens and political leaders are indoctrinated to view the world in black and white terms, e.g., us vs. them, good and evil. Tell me who you stand with and I’ll tell you what side of history you’re on.
When you ‘Stand with Israel,’ does that mean you stand for genocide? Does it mean you don’t care about the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, children who have been displaced, injured physically and psychologically, and slaughtered? Are their lives of less value than those of Israelis? Are they of no value?
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is Israel’s ‘final solution’ in ‘cleansing’ the country of Palestinians. (As a student of German history, I don’t use this term lightly.) The persecuted have come full circle by becoming the persecutors whereby the ends always justify the means. As many have observed, Palestinians have become the Jews of the 21st century.”
State-Sanctioned Murder of Innocents as the Ultimate Human Rights Violation
I had an unpleasant but necessary exchange on LinkedIn, “the world’s largest professional network on the internet,” with J., a colleague with a Ph.D. who is an anthropologist and gender specialist, and highlights human rights in her profile. As part of a discussion about Israel and the U.S., I noted that both countries have much in common.
“They’re both essentially settler colonial states that have inflicted untold suffering and misery on ‘undesirables’ within and beyond their borders. It’s a given that the lives of their citizens are more valuable than those of ‘the other.’ Take the US war in Vietnam, for example. 58,220 US Americans perished while 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed. Yet it’s always been about US(A). This Harold Pinter quote is relevant: ‘The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.’”
I also referred to Israel as “a terrorist state by any reasonable definition of the term” and “a pariah state, an outcast in the global community.”
J.’s ill-informed and off-the-mark response: “I think that this is a very unfair and very uniformed comment. Calling Israel a ‘terrorist’ state is beyond unreasonable. It is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights. It allows anyone to have citizenship, regardless of their ethnicity, UNLIKE their neighbors. They are continuously attacked and then blamed when they resound (read response) in defense. What is also continuously ignored is the widespread hate for Jewish people, and non Muslims in general, that runs rife in the region. It is ignored that this is the primary reason for the continued aggression and hostility towards Israel as is the fact that all of the other countries in the region run tyrannical regimes that don’t afford the rights to their citizens that Israel does.”
You’ll notice she trots out the old canard, self-defense, as a justification for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and now Lebanon and Syria. It’s obvious she’s consumed enormous quantities of the blue and white Kool-Aid served up by Israel’s 24/7 propaganda machine.
But, hey, aside from the rampant racism in Israeli society, which J. either ignores or is blissfully ignorant of, the genocide in Gaza, and the murder of over a thousand civilians in Lebanon with no end in sight, Israel “is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights.”
The Complicity of Silence, The Moral Obligation of Resistance
You can be a celebrity or an ordinary person. If you stay SILENT, PASSIVE, INACTIVE while Palestinians trapped in Gaza – humans who breath, feel and dream exactly like you – get slaughtered by an unchecked army, you are no different from those who continued to go by their lives during past genocides who erased from earth millions.
-Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Instagram post, October 15, 2024)
All I can do from Vietnam is speak out in general and to fellow international educators (see International educators need to end their silence on Gaza), especially in my home country, who have remained silent in the face of the monstrous crimes being committed day and night by the Israeli military and that country’s political leadership.
It saddens and infuriates me that US international education leaders such as Dr. Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education (IIE) among others, are among the silent.
Since I cannot read their hearts and minds, I don’t know if Victor Hugo’s observation that “It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie” applies to these colleagues and others who remain silent. What I do know is that their choice not to speak out against this genocide is a political statement, and a damning one at that. Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author, echoed this theme in response to a question about genocide posed by a young national security professional: “Even if you don’t do anything, if you allow the people to kill and destroy … that is also violence. Violence can be action or non-action.”
I was part of that quasi-US governmental world for four years of my decades-long career and am therefore familiar with the usual political and economic arguments in favor of silence, e.g., don’t damage important official relationships and “whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” I reject and condemn them, now as I did then. Silence is inexcusable, unconscionable, and unforgivable.
How I wish they would take this Elie Wiesel quote to heart: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Like other Holocaust survivors, I’m certain Wiesel would have taken the side of the Palestinians on the receiving end of Israel’s bullets and bombs.
Nobody But You, a poem by Charles Bukowski, comes to mind:
nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly
inside.nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.think about it.
think about saving your self.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your self as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.only you can save your
self.do it! do it!
then you’ll know exactly what
I am talking about.
Don’t be “a “faceless, mindless, heartless being” who experiences “death before death.” Our fellow human beings, men, women, and children are being murdered daily and the survivors are enduring unimaginable suffering. “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Save your spiritual self by speaking out against injustice and cruelty. It’s the least we can do, a meaningful way to live in the brief time we have been granted.
People show their true colors by what they say and do and by their complicity in silence. We and those who come after us will not forget what was said and not said, done and not done in this, the first livestreamed and meticulously documented genocide in human history. I say this not as a threat but as a solemn promise to the victims of this still unfolding early 21st century human catastrophe. Those who are actively involved in this genocide and regional state terrorism have more to fear aside from whatever their consciences may throw up. The official and unofficial days of reckoning can’t come soon enough.
Solutions for Sadness
In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlin proposes a solution for being sad: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
This is what I have done, to add to my admittedly scant knowledge about the origins of the founding of the state of Israel, including what Nurit Peled-Elhanan referred to as the “pure colonialist, nationalist and chauvinistic racism” that pervades Israeli society in her speech at the Closing Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2013.
Another solution to sadness is to tap into a community of kindred spirits in international education and beyond. I have found my community, my people, online. There is no more important and urgent use of this space right now. Members of my online tribe include anti-Zionist Jews, Holocaust survivors, Muslims, and Palestianians in Gaza and the global diaspora, people from all walks of life. They are sources of real-time information and commiseration, and an endless well of inspiration. They give me hope as do those who have been martyred and their fellow human beings struggling to survive in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. As global citizens who believe in truth and justice, fear no one, and act with compassion and passion in the pursuit of common goals, we are legion.
Or create a video slideshow of injured, dying, displaced, and dead Palestinians set to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as a way of reflecting on and processing the Israeli-planned and -executed carnage that is occurring in Gaza.
Or create a page on my blog Israel’s Genocide in Gaza – And Other Regional Acts of Israeli State Terrorism that I update regularly.
Finally, there are abundant opportunities for individuals to offer financial support via legitimate international non-governmental organizations that will benefit the people of Gaza.
All I have are my moral compass, my words, and my support. They are small but count for something for I am not alone. I am consoled and encouraged by the realization that millions of others are doing what they can in myriad ways large and small to combat this evil and help the victims now and in the future.
Amina Youssef, a Lebanese Australian lawyer based in Sydney, wrote the following on LinkedIn that applies to all of us but especially those who remain silent:
It’s easy for you to get off social media.
It’s easy for you to unfollow.
It’s easy for you to close your eyes while a genocide occurs in Gaza and our people are killed in Lebanon.
It’s easy for you to say protestors are making you uncomfortable.
You have choices.
They do not.
You have power.
They do not.
What you do today can make an impact on helpless people who cannot do anything at all to help themselves.
Even if nothing comes of it, at least you tried.
What can we as global citzens do to ensure this noble call to action becomes a reality, to honor the memory of the martyred, and assist the survivors? This is one of the burning questions of our time and should be on the mind of everyone with a conscience. We must try “even if nothing comes of it.”
Eye on the Calendar
Arundhati Roy’s conclusion to her PEN Pinter Prize 2024 acceptance speech touched my heart, mind, and soul with its passion and crystal moral clarity. She quoted from Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s book of prison writing You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.
I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.
‘The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.’
As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—
From the river to the sea
Palestine will be Free.
It will.
Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.
That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.
As a student of history, including settler colonialism, which my country happily co-opted from the homeland of my ancestors and perfected to a tee, I know in my heart that both speak the truth.