A Silent Scream – Sonoma Sun

Posted on September 7, 2024 by David Bolling

There’s a silent scream stuck in my throat. It’s been there for as long as I can remember.

As a child, living two of my most formative years in immediate postwar Berlin, with forays into the rubble of the Third Reich, seeing lines of refugees several blocks long waiting for a free lunch at my mother’s kitchen door, playing with orphaned children in the forts we had built on bombed-out land, speaking the German of a five-year-old without understanding why I was somehow separate and superior, breathing in the existential trauma that hung in the air, I absorbed the afterglow of organized evil without a protective filter.

Years later, in my early teens, I visited Dachau, the first model of industrialized genocide, a thirty-minute tram ride from the charms of downtown Munich and the famous beer hall where the Nazi party was born. I walked in absolute silence through the shocking exhibits, past the crematoria, unable to comprehend how any people, any culture, could integrate such mechanized, mechanised murder into the daily structure of their society. They killed people with the same efficiency they used to build the world’s greatest cars.

I can’t say I’ve truly overcome that trauma, and the silent scream it provoked is still stuck, unfinished, incomprehensible in my chest. But it leads me, inexorably, to Gaza, where the latest toll of civilian deaths is equally incomprehensible.

According to the Palestinian Health Authority, more than 40,000 people have been killed, mostly civilians, and at least 70 percent are women and children. Israel disputes this figure, saying at least 14,000 of the dead are Hamas fighters. World Health Organization estimates now suggest that if the war ended tomorrow, the residual effects of disease, hunger and injury could push the total death toll to more than 186,000. And now we learn that polio has emerged in the misery of bombed-out Gaza. At some point, numbers are just numbers. But a dead baby in the arms of its bloodied mother says more than any number. As does the image of an Israeli teenager raped and burned alive by Hamas.

So where does it end?

It has been said that violence as a means of achieving justice is both unrealistic and immoral. For, as Gandhi never said, but as many others have, an eye for an eye ends up making the whole world blind. It is also unrealistic because, in the case of Israel, nothing in recent years has so inflamed and radicalized Palestinians and Arabs as Israel’s disproportionate annihilation of life in Gaza.

It is absurd to try to determine who is responsible. But it is an existential fact that, under Bibi Netanyahu, the ruling coalition in the Knesset has had no interest or intention in trying to implement the only viable agreement that could end this madness – a two-state solution that guarantees Palestinian autonomy and territorial integrity. Instead, the Netanyahu government has systematically encouraged and subsidized illegal settlements in the West Bank, served by private roads that cut Palestinians off from their olive groves, their homes, their ancestral lands. I have been there, I have seen it. And now, makeshift “outposts” have sprung up by the hundreds, creating more confrontations between aggressive, radical Jewish “settlers” and Palestinians now driven off their own lands.

There is no simple solution to all this, but there is one simple, concrete step that can and must be taken to inject at least some rational justice into this mess. The United States should immediately cease all arms shipments to Israel until Netanyahu has agreed to a ceasefire. And we should all, in every forum at our disposal, demand that this be done now.