Don’t look away

They could be your kids. It could be you.

Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.

Tonight’s piece is a little bit different than usual.

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It was sweltering hot and stiflingly humid in New York City yesterday, the kind of weather that makes you resent every little inconvenience. Morning delays on the C train had me grumbling up to Washington Heights, where I had to walk an extra 10 minutes to the hospital to grab a cache of my own medical records — MRIs, CT scans, echocardiograms — so I could ship them to another cardiac surgeon.

That transferring records wasn’t a seamless process deeply annoyed me in a self-pitying kind of way. But the long delay gave me time to catch up on the morning headlines, a reality check that rightfully made me feel like an asshole for my self-indulgence.

The images out of Gaza — wailing parents clutching the withered remains of children murdered by starvation, famished doctors shaking over bullet-ridden bodies amid the rubble of razed hospitals — are shocking and abhorrent, a collage of the atrocities we always say can never happen again. And now, after Israel once insisting that it would never attack them, so many unannounced assaults have left zero fully functioning hospitals still standing in the Gaza Strip.

Some of the remaining hospitals are closer to ruins than medical centers, with little electricity and few supplies. Curable diseases are now death sentences, bullet wounds increasingly difficult to cauterize.

There are Hamas combatants and gangs among the wounded and dead, but a vast majority were innocent civilians, half of them women and children. Many went without any medical care as hell closed in, and all because they were born in a particular time and place. Cursed by the whims of existence, they suffered the unspeakable, denied even the most basic human dignities. There’s no good reason why we’re on this side of the world, just as there’s no good reason that they are surrounded by death, unable to access care.

The genocide has been ongoing for nearly two years, a nonstop slaughter that has killed at least 60,000 Palestinians through direct violence, and far more through disease, starvation, and lack of medicine — in January, that number was estimated to be around 80,000 people. In July, it rose to 100,000. At least 900,000 children are starving. This is not about a country’s self-defense. If anything, the relentless cruelty only endangers Israelis and Jews around the world.

Dozens more — maybe hundreds, unreported and buried in the rubble — die every day. Almost all aid is being blocked from entering what’s become a wasteland, because the far-right Israeli government wants to fully eliminate all that is left of Palestine and banish all of its people — something many officials proudly tout.

There is no other way to explain the death of Zeinab Abu Halib, an infant who spent her five months on this earth shriveling away until she hardly existed at all.

Zeinab as a newborn and a murder victim

I can’t pinpoint what changed this week — maybe it was the UN report that everyone is dying in a diabolical “man-made” famine, or perhaps the confirmation that a thousand desperate aid-seekers have been shot dead by IDF soldiers since May — but politicians and organizations are finally starting to call for the end to the Israeli blockade of foreign aid in Gaza.

The statements have rarely cast any blame (for obvious reasons) and still play into the farce that Netanyahu gives a shit about freeing the hostages, so I don’t know how much they’ll make a difference; the Israeli government knows it can operate with impunity. The announcement that the IDF will be air-dropping humanitarian aid is just cover, as experts say it will do little to solve the problem.

One of the reasons why so many politicians have been so cowardly is that cynical actors have weaponized the Holocaust to silence and deter protestors and critics. When you’re Jewish, at least in my experience, you spend much of your life learning about and observing artifacts from the Holocaust, so it is impossible for me to understand how the footage out of Gaza do not immediately trigger memories of the images seared into our brains.

On the left, a Palestinian girl in Gaza. On the right, a Jewish girl in Amsterdam.

Many of us — most of us — have voted for politicians who have either directly conflated opposition to this genocide with antisemitism or been cowed into supporting Israel’s actions with that rhetoric. I can’t imagine them truly stepping up any time soon, so the onus is on us to do whatever we can to help the innocent people being systematically tortured in Gaza.

Here are a few places that could really use your support:

The Sameer Project uses funds to purchase tents, food, and water for displaced families in southern Gaza. Prices are skyrocketing due to unscrupulous merchants, so every dollar is important.

Translating Falasteen is working with The Sameer Project to provide similar supplies to suffering families in Northern Gaza. No inch of Palestine has been spared and it’s important to donate wherever possible.

There’s also a medical aid project that the organizations are running together. Among other things, they’ve produced pop-up medical tents and treated people where there is no care available, purchased and distributed vital medication, and gotten supplies to Nasser Hospital, one of the few functioning medical facilities left.

Individual families have also had funds set up on their behalves. This one is for a 14-year-old girl named Farah who is fighting chronic illnesses exacerbated by severe malnutrition.

There are many other funds and families who desperately need your donations, and you can find many of them right here.

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