I’m not confident about much but I’m confident that I know more about genocide than the average person.

This is in large part because my sister studied it in college, including doing field research in Kosovo and writing a thesis on international responses to Serbian military actions during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Unfortunately, when you spend as many long car rides as I do listening to audiobooks about crimes against humanity, you learn that America has a long history of ignoring genocide and ethnic cleansing as it is happening.

Our government knew about the Holocaust by 1942, and was aware of ongoing persecution of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe well before then. But due to a combination of post-World War I isolationism and unbridled anti-semitism, both from the government and the American people in general, we stood by and did nothing.

From 1938 to 1941, as Jews attempted to flee Nazi repression – the writing was on the wall – Americans remained staunchly against allowing European Jews to immigrate to America. Even though it was almost 100 years ago, the sentiments cited were basically the same as anti-immigration Americans hold today: fears about crime and immigrants taking their jobs. American soldiers liberated the death camps, but they didn’t do much to stop their creation.

We took no action in Rwanda as Hutu genocidaires slaughtered almost a million Tutsis with machetes over a three-month period in 1994.

Armenia. Bangladesh. Cambodia. Part of the reason my sister studied Bosnia and Kosovo was because it was one of the only times the United States actually did something, even if it wasn’t exactly in a timely fashion. 

So it’s not a surprise to me that, despite the International Court of Justice at the United Nations ordered Israel to “do all it can” to prevent “deaths, destruction, and any acts of genocide” in Gaza, the United States has said it won’t change any of its current actions towards Israel, and will continue sending weapons.

It’s crazy-making, is what it is. On my phone, I see Palestinians tweeting and Instagramming and Facebooking the horrors they are going through: death and fear and suffering and deprivation and the popcorn-thunder sounds of bombs falling. Then I turn to my television screen and I see our country’s leaders downplaying, handwaving and doing nothing at all to stop it.

Innocent people are dying. Stop giving the Israeli military weapons until they show some ability to prevent mass death and suffering. If this is the best that Israel’s military can do to prevent unnecessary civilian casualties, it is utterly incompetent. The IDF has also proven incompetent at rescuing the Israeli hostages currently sitting captive in Gaza. Since Oct. 7, the military has rescued a grand total of one hostage and shot three after mistaking them for Palestinians.

The Gaza strip is 25 miles long and 7 miles wide at its widest point. For comparison, that’s the length between Portland and Brunswick, and the width between Portland’s City Hall and Falmouth’s Town Hall. So imagine those dimensions, but with the entire combined population of Maine and Vermont crammed into them, half of whom are children.

They are not allowed to leave. They are constantly being bombed. Sufficient quantities of humanitarian supplies are not being allowed in. Famine is setting in. The health care system is non-existent. Destruction of sanitary infrastructure and crowding of refugees means that communicable diseases are beginning to run rampant, which may end up killing more Palestinians than the bombs. According to a BBC analysis, up to 60% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Roughly 26,000 Palestinians have been confirmed dead, and there may very well be more under the rubble. Israel’s government claims 9,000 of those are Hamas militants. Even if that’s true, that leaves 17,000 who aren’t.

You don’t need to read a 16,000-word thesis titled “Genocide in Bosnia to Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo: International Responses’ Influence on Serb Military Actions” to know that what is happening in Gaza is not right. (Though yes, Virginia, I did read your thesis.)

And as that particular thesis points out, one of the reasons that genocide is difficult to prosecute in a court of law is because “what is genocide to one group is justified military action to their opponent.” And we have certainly been given a lot of justifications, although it seems to me most of it boils down to “but, Hamas.” Sometimes it feels like “but, Hamas” is the new “but, ISIS” which was the new “but, al-Qaeda.” Over the past 25 years, Americans have been trained to react to the names of Islamic terrorist groups the same way my dog reacts to the sight of the mailman: losing all critical thinking skills and going aggressively berserk. 

People say they don’t want America to be the world’s policeman. America has never really been the world’s policeman, not when it comes to protecting the innocent or standing up for the little guy. America is, at best, a bystander. At worse, we are actively handing the bullies a stick. 

Nothing Hamas did or is doing absolves Israel and America of their moral responsibility. Oct. 7 was horrific. The hostages that Hamas took should be released immediately. And none of it justifies or excuses what is happening to innocent people in Gaza. 

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Gaza is full of people. Regular human people. Some have done bad things, some have done good things. Most are pretty average folks doing the best they can with the hand they’ve been dealt, just like the rest of us. Even if you don’t particularly care about the humanity of the Palestinians, continuing this onslaught is only going to create more terrorists. I

think I have a pretty decent moral core, but if you bombed my house, killed my mom, gave me a c-section without anesthesia and took away all hope for a better future, I’d probably start getting violent too. There are millions of innocent Israeli citizens who also deserve freedom from fear.

It’s 2024. Surely humanity can figure out a better solution than “getting rid of an entire ethnic group.” 

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