What is happening in Gaza is an injury to our collective conscience

Written By Grahame Russell

“Army of slaughter paving way for genocide and population transfer”

“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] of the past 20 months is an army of slaughter like the world has never seen. An army paving the way for genocide and population transfer … It destroys and takes pride, kills and preens.”
(Israeli HAARETZ journalist Gideon Levy - Link to article below)

With no end in sight, we are in month 21 of U.S., Canadian and Western-backed, enabled and legitimized genocidal ethnic cleansing in Palestine

What is happening in Gaza is an injury to our collective conscience
June 20, 2025, by Gabor Maté, Contributor
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/what-is-happening-in-gaza-is-an-injury-to-our-collective-conscience-we-must-be/article_a7f914c7-febe-4175-b343-28a19f50c3f9.html

(Dr. Gabor Maté is a retired physician, an international public speaker and the author, most recently, of “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.”)

The spectre of antisemitism looms over perhaps the most divisive, emotionally fraught and heart-rending moral issue of our time: that of Gaza. While real enough, all too real as a heinous ideology, these days antisemitism is also at times a phantasm, evoked to intimidate people from expressing their grief, outrage, and demands for justice.

It is essential that people of conscience — Jews, non-Jews, all of us, strive to make that crucial distinction. The costs of failing to do so are devastating, for human lives in the Middle East, and devastating, too, for the moral and psychic well-being of many others, including here in Canada.

“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] of the past 20 months is an army of slaughter like the world has never seen. An army paving the way for genocide and population transfer … It destroys and takes pride, kills and preens.” So writes the intrepid Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in a recent column.

Harsh words? If so, Levy is far from alone. Renowned Israeli scholars of genocide have found that their country’s actions in Gaza meet the international legal definition of that felony.

A widely circulated petition by over 1300 Israeli academics denounces what they term “this horrifying litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity … We cannot claim we did not know. We have been silent for too long.”

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged, “yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

IDF reserve major general Yair Golan, leader of the Democratic party in the Knesset, has accused Israeli forces in Gaza of killing babies “for a hobby.”

We could learn from such salutary bluntness, for in Canada similar openness is heavily discouraged. In this country, voicing like opinions would immediately draw — has drawn — charges of antisemitic “blood libel,” or, if uttered by Jews like me, of coming from self-hating supporters of terror.

In the health care field, my own domain of work, people have lost their jobs or have been threatened with professional disqualification for saying far less. Statements pointing to Israel’s oppressive and lethal actions are portrayed as slanderous, beyond the pale of reasoned commentary. They make some Jewish people feel singled out and “unsafe,” is the usual complaint. I know of no cases of medical personnel being harassed over exercising their democratic right to support Israeli policy.

Just as nothing justifies the atrocities of October 7, nothing about October 7 justifies Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians, either before or since October 7.

Recently, I listened to orthopedic surgeon Dr. Deirdre Nunan, like me a graduate of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, recount her harrowing experiences serving in a Gaza hospital under the siege that followed Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in March.

Her depictions of unspeakable horror, enacted as policy by one of the world’s most sophisticated militaries, were soul shattering. Many other physicians — Canadian, American, Jewish, Muslim, Christian — who have worked in Gaza speak in similar terms. British doctors describe witnessing “a slaughterhouse.” All their testimonies are widely accessible.

The leading medical journal Lancet editorialized that in its assault on health care facilities and personnel in Gaza, “the Israeli Government has acted with impunity … Many medical academies and health professional organizations that claim a commitment to social justice have failed to speak out.”

As if to illustrate that lament, a letter by a group of us concerned physicians, several of us Jewish, to the British Columbia Medical Journal decrying the offensive against Gaza’s health system, was refused. It failed to meet the Journal’s “criteria,” we were told.

It both appalled and pained us that the urgency of drawing attention to the large-scale and deliberate targeting, killing and torture of our Palestinian health colleagues — with the evident complicity of the Israeli medical establishment — was not deemed sufficient to warrant publication.

Dr. Adnan El-Bursh, for example, head of orthopedics at Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital, was a dedicated surgeon, athlete and the father of five. In what moral universe or realm of professional ethics is it not the immediate and compelling concern of every medical body and institution on the planet that this vigorous 51 year old, abducted from work, died in torment after being “processed” for five months in Israel’s notorious detention centres?

I am well familiar with antisemitism. Growing up in post-war Hungary I was often confronted with it as, for example, when being attacked by a group voicing Jew-baiting slogans. I had a friend come to my defence. “Leave him alone,” he chided the bullies. “it’s not his fault he is Jewish.” “Great,” it struck me — “a fault, but at least not mine.”

It may be true that antisemitic animus can lurk behind critiques of Zionism. But in my decades of advocacy for Palestinian rights including medical visits to Gaza and the West Bank, I have rarely witnessed it. When present, it has a certain tone that one can feel is directed at Jewishness itself, rather than at the theory and practice of Zionism or at Israel’s actions.

What is far more common and genuinely confusing for many is that Israel and its supporters, Jews and non-Jews, habitually confound opposition to Israeli policy with antisemitism.

This is akin to Vietnam War protesters being accused of anti-Americanism. How is opposing the napalming of human beings anti-American or, say, deploring Israel’s use of mass starvation as a weapon of war in any sense anti-Jewish?

The effect is that many are terrified to speak out. No one wants to be associated with one of the most noxious ideologies in history and people also genuinely fear being ostracized. I meet such people everywhere. Their hearts anguished, their lips remain tight. “I am outraged; I have nightmares. I feel completely helpless,” one woman told me. “It’s distressing, every day.” 

“As a Jew I’m appalled at what Israel is doing,” the head of a leading Canadian cultural organization avowed in a private conversation, “but I have many employees. I cannot jeopardize their jobs.”

Many suffer what has been called “moral injury,” a mental state that occurs “under stressful circumstances, [when] people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” It’s disturbing to experience, accompanied by a sense of inertness and shame.

The only resolution is the freeing of the discussion around Gaza. People deserve the right to experience as much liberty to publicly mourn, question, oppose, deplore, denounce what they perceive as the perpetration of injustice and inhumanity as they are, in this country, to advocate for the aims and actions of the Israeli government and its Canadian abettors amongst our political leadership, academia, and media.

Even if we feel powerless to stop the first genocide we have ever watched on our screens in real time, allow at least our hearts to be broken openly, as mine is. And more, let us be free to take democratic, non-hateful action without fear of incurring the calumny of racism.

Israeli soldiers say they were ordered to fire at unarmed aid seekers
Al Jazeera Live Updates summarizes, June 27, 2025
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/6/27/live-israel-kills-over-70-in-gaza-as-549-killed-seeking-aid-in-past-month

Israeli officers and soldiers have told HAREETZ newspaper that they were instructed to shoot at unarmed Palestinians seeking aid at designated distribution zones in Gaza.

'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid
By Nir Hasson, Yaniv Kubovich, Bar Peleg, HAARETZ News, June 27, 2025
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000

In the HAARETZ report, the soldiers described how they fired on crowds of aid seekers to prevent them approaching or disperse them, rather than using non-lethal crowd control measures. “It’s a killing field … where I was, between one and five people were killed every day,” one soldier said.

“They fire on them as if they were an attacking force: they don’t use riot control devices, they don’t shoot tear gas, they shoot everything you can think of – a heavy machine gun, a grenade launcher, mortars. He added: “We communicate with them through fire.”

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 549 people have been killed near aid centres since they began operating in late May.

The U.S. has just approved $30m in funding for [the GHF - Gaza Humanitarian Foundation], despite the routine violence at its sites and warnings from human rights lawyers that its staff could be held criminally liable for complicity in war crimes.

Genocide as U.S. and Western-backed policy

Rights Action knows much about the genocides carried out by U.S. and Western-backed military regimes in Guatemala in the 1970s- 80s, targeting and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, a majority being Mayan indigenous. During the worst years (1978-1983), U.S. allies – mainly Britain, France, Israel, Germany and military regimes in Chile and Argentina – also provided military aid, weapons and training to the genocidal regimes.

The legacies of the genocides are an on-going lived experience today in the lives and communities of the Guatemalan survivors, their children and grand-children. Much of Rights Action’s work in Guatemala over the last 30 years is related directly to the U.S. and Western back genocides and destruction, and their aftermath:

Accountability for U.S., Canadian and Western complicity

As we try to do with our work in Guatemala and Honduras, Rights Action encourages and supports education, organizing and activism work to hold the U.S.-led West legally and politically accountable for supporting, enabling and legitimizing Israel’s systematic crimes against humanity and war crimes against Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Need to diversify media sources

Rights Action urges everyone to diversify their news sources, as a necessary antidote to the oftentimes harmful, misleading reporting coming from much of the mainstream government and corporate media in the U.S., the E.U. and Canada. We recommend daily news provided by Al Jazeera news (https://www.aljazeera.com), HAARETZ News (www.haaretz.com), Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org), The Real News (https://therealnews.com/), etc.

We recommend getting involved with / following news feeds of

Grahame Russell
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Legal investigation into legitimacy of mining licenses of Montreal-based Central America Nickel in Guatemala