Over 377,000 people, half of them children, are missing in Gaza since Oct 2023, says a Harvard-linked report, pointing to a far higher death toll than reported. By Marilyn Garson.
Those of us with Gazan friends have struggled to reconcile the scale of our friends’ losses with the official counts of Gaza’s death toll. For the numbers to make sense, our friends’ families would have to have been disproportionately targeted – or the number of deaths would have to be far greater than those counted by Gaza’s health ministry.
This measure of missing population makes a great deal more sense. It also lets us include those who have been forced to leave, taking on crippling debt for the sake of their children’s safety. How many, we do not know – but Harvard’s measure embraces their absence. Anyone who has been physically to places waking up from genocide knows that a pervasive, silent sense of absence precedes meaningful numbers. Spacial mapping captures that. Israel is emptying Gaza of its people.
Yet again, Alternative Jewish Voices implores our government to stand up and act on what we know of Israel’s illegal occupation and genocide. It is no excuse for our government to say that we cannot end the genocide alone. For two thousand years, a Jewish adage has reminded us that we are obliged to undertake even the work we cannot complete.
It matters to state who we are and attach ourselves to morality, international humanitarian law and human dignity. It matters to every one of our battered souls that we do what can be done to stop the genocide taking place on our watch.
This article was first published by Sh'ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ)
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated.