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Most hospitals have been shelled. Almost every street is deserted. As are the few stores still open, whose shelves are mostly empty. Homes crumbled into ruins, sidewalks torn up by shells, buildings pulled to pieces for firewood, graves destroyed, and tombstones used as tables for open air meals. Dogs howl through the streets as an army of rats, seeking food, scamper under peoples’ feet. Many of those trapped in this cauldron are covered with lice and filth, while anxious and malnourished women and children watch passersby with wistful eyes.
This is the scene observed by a reporter who is no longer with us. He likely died over 100 years ago. And what was being described wasn’t Gaza. It was Vicksburg, Mississippi in the summer of 1863, while under siege by a Union Army commanded by Ulysses S. Grant during a pivotal battle in the American Civil War (as described in The Generals, by Nancy and Scott Anderson, pg. 309).
I have never fired a gun in anger, seen an actual bomb explode, or been subjected to anything even vaguely resembling the October 7 pogrom by Hamas or the brutal retaliation by Israel that has followed. And I will do whatever I reasonably can to never experience any of those horrors.
That said, what Gaza is undergoing is a violent siege in which both the innocent and the guilty are being maimed and killed. Not a campaign to exterminate Palestinians because they are Palestinians. Not genocide.
I am quite certain that distinction does not matter to those who are suffering in Gaza. It should, however, matter to the rest of us. Because America does not ally itself with genocidal regimes. There are no democracies in the Middle East save one – Israel. Which is also the only society in that region whose values – writ large – align with ours, and one of the very few military forces in the world that will willingly spill their blood and their treasure to help us.
The world has become stupid enough. Let’s not add to it
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