Protest marks 2 years of US-funded genocide in Gaza

Presenter: Protesters marked two years of U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza with a rally Oct. 4 at the federal courthouse in Eugene, and KEPW’s Todd Boyle was there. Here are two of the speakers from that event, Dr. Mark Brauner, and first, Bo Beaver, speaking about her cousin, Windfield Beaver:

Bo Beaver: I’m going to talk a little bit today about my cousin, Wind. And Vets About Face are the reason that we got him home. So thank you so much to our Veterans For Peace people here today.

[00:00:33] I feel as if every time we think we must have run out of words to say about this outpouring of suffering, a brand new horror leaves us with the responsibility to keep finding the words. I share with you mine.

[00:00:45] Against international law, the wishes of the world, and fundamental humanity, my cousin, Wind, was kidnapped by the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces). (Shame!) He was one of nearly 500 others on the Global Sumud Flotilla.

[00:00:59] Traveling aboard the Ohwayla, Windfield Beaver was what they titled a problem-solver. He moved from ship to ship to tackle structural issues. He worked as a mechanic and a carpenter in his day-to-day life, but he would tell you that despite his very varied life, he had no direction until he decided to get on that boat and sail to Gaza and help those people.

[00:01:20] It is my sincere hope for everyone here that you find something you’re that convicted and impassioned about.

[00:01:24] But the thing that has kept me up at night, watching with the rest of the world on these various cameras and livestreams—as armed soldiers boarded civilian humanitarian boats in international waters—is knowing that we paid for those guns.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the footage, but guns were pointed in protesters’ faces, whether their hands were up, and we paid for them. That money could have fed your neighbors, housed your neighbors, clothed your neighbors. It could have paid for our educations, and it went to guns.

[00:02:02] Wind was interviewed. He was asked what he would like to say to his family in the face of an uncertain future. To this, he said: ‘I believe strongly that the world we want to live in demands action and participation.’

To this, he said: ‘To do nothing is to accept a murderous, unspeakable violence.’

[00:02:22] He said: ‘By bringing with me the privilege and the visibility I have as an American, I am bringing with me the eyes of the world, to see the violence that Israel is perpetrating.’ He trusted in the compassion of fellow humans to see him and bring him home. He trusted in the world to wake up and free Palestine.

[00:02:43] When I feel pain for my family, I remember all the pain of all the families in Gaza, the mass starvation, the cruelty, and the killing that is rampaging on for so long that I think this was the 38th attempt to reach Gaza in this way.

[00:02:59] When I feel that discomfort, the disconnect from what I want the world to be in what it has become, Wind’s choice and the resilience of the Palestinian people calls me to speak and act. So I’ll speak clearly. Israel’s newest war crime will not discourage the world.

[00:03:14] Last week, eight boats left Sicily, and a ninth is catching up to them as of a day ago. They say the interception is only encouraging them to sail faster. We will demand their safety, as well as the return of the passengers on the Sumud Flotilla. We will keep sending ships until this genocidal siege is broken.

[00:03:39] And we got the news this morning that Wind is the sole American heading home on the ship from Turkey. He is the only American, despite the many other veterans and people in the 137 that have been deported early, out of the nearly 500 that Israel kidnapped. That is not enough.

[00:04:03] For all the people that have been starved and abused systematically, it is not enough.

[00:04:09] I get to see my family come home safe. And I’ve spent the past two years watching mother after mother, child after child, husband after wife, that don’t get to say that.

[00:04:20] My cousin’s return will not make me complacent or complicit. I will not be satisfied until the siege on Gaza is broken, until Israel is held accountable for its many, many, many violations of international law.

[00:04:37] Tangibly, it took hundreds of phone calls from Vets About Face and my community to get him home. So please call the embassy, call your representatives, get on to the websites where these people’s names are and call their representatives. There are literally hundreds of phone calls to make. Make them. Do more than that: be out here. Free Palestine!

[00:05:05] Kaleigh Bronson-Cook: My name is Kaleigh. I’m an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and today is an international day of action for Gaza.

[00:05:15] We are gathered today to protest two full years of genocide carried out by Israel and the United States government against the people of Gaza.

[00:05:31] Next, we have Dr. Mark Brauner, who is a emergency physician. He worked in Nasser Hospital in Gaza last June, and he was also a part of the medical team in the Global Sumud Flotilla in Tunisia. He is an activist and writer. Please give it up for Mark.

[00:05:46] Dr. Mark Brauner: Hey, everybody. I want to read a spoken word piece that I wrote while I was in Gaza. And you know that staircase on the outside of Nasser Hospital that was bombed a few weeks ago? Well, that’s where I sat and wrote this at night, 2:00 to 3:00 in the morning when things slowed down in the trauma bay. And it really, I think, kind of explains how I feel about my experience more than anything. And I’ve never been able to read this without crying. So, I apologize.

[00:06:23] When I arrived at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, I thought I might be helpful. I had skills, knowledge, experience, but I found something entirely different.

[00:06:34] A theology of suffering, a human-built mosque, an Aya Sophia built of flesh and rebar, tarps and ash, a sacred geometry laid down in grief, a place where stones have been replaced by the soft bones of children, and the call to prayer is now the wail of a mother whose baby was just wrapped in a death shroud.

[00:07:00] Gaza is not rubble. It is a broken house of God, a mosque of flesh and resilience, where every injured child is a mihrab pointing back towards humanity. I found faces, hundreds of them, children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked without accusation or anger, ‘Are you still human?’

[00:07:47] The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that the face of the other is the foundation of ethics. Not metaphysical, but literal. Another human staring at you in the face with radical vulnerability, not asking for anything, just being, and in that being command you, that shalt not kill and thou art responsible.

[00:08:12] That’s Gaza, in the face of the other, it is the face of the other turned towards us, we, the West, armchair allies, media skeptics, IOF apologists, and progressive hand-wringers alike. We are all being looked at and we are failing.

[00:08:34] There’s no universe, no scripture, no coda, no strand of human DNA where it’s natural to shoot children in the back of the head as they carry sacks of flour. There’s no ethical system, no wartime doctrine, no security calculus in which a mother killed while reaching for fava beans can be explained away. And if you try, it is violence to language itself.

[00:09:13] What’s happening to Gaza is not war, not strategy, not self-defense. It’s the ritualized and systematic destruction of the most vulnerable, performed in broad daylight under the collapsing architecture of international law. It’s unnatural, not just wrong, not just cruel, but a rupture in the moral biology of our species.

[00:09:40] It offends the fundamental contract of being alive. It is a humiliation of biology and a heresy against physics. It is unnatural, like fission, a tearing apart of what was never meant to be touched. It belongs to the stars, to the incomprehensibility, to cataclysm, to apocalypse, and it does not belong on earth and never in the body of a child.

[00:10:09] There’s a room in the Emergency Department with six trauma bays, a floor of mosaic congealed scrubbed and recongealed blood. Every 20 minutes a crew enters, picks up debris: tissue, IV tubing, gauze, and throws water across the floor at an alluvial plain. With long squeegees they pushed the red tide into the drain, meticulous, mechanical, still it cannot erase the smell, it cannot erase the taste of blood or the faces.

[00:10:42] A 14-year-old girl arrived while I was in the emergency department. Her shoulder was gone. It wasn’t dislocated. It wasn’t fractured. It was gone. She was sitting in her tent, reading, studying for school. Her shoulder was replaced by shredded muscle, smoke, and dirt. Her dark eyes were open. She was conscious. Her mouth moved, but she did not speak.

[00:11:13] That is (Emmanual) Levinas’s face: The face that makes no demand, but reveals everything.

[00:11:22] The children killed while receiving food were not on a battlefield. They were in the ruins of society deliberately starved. This is not collateral damage. This is intentional, the predictable outcome of a siege that weaponizes hunger and punishes the hungry for trying to survive in it.

[00:11:42] What makes it more obscene is the silence that follows each killing, western governments mouth the words ‘ civilian casualties’ as if they were clerical errors. The media speaks of complexities and context as if context renders dead toddlers invisible.

[00:12:00] Theological contortionists twist history and prophecy to justify a baby’s flesh split open by shrapnel in some redemptive arc. It is not justified. It is a desecration of everything sacred. And it is being done with the money, silence, and diplomatic cover of the so-called civilized world.

[00:12:22] I thought often of my children when I was there (they’re adults). I missed them with an ache that broke open every time I heard a child cry. Before I went, I recorded a video in case I didn’t return. I wasn’t trying to inspire. I just needed to say the truth: The world is on fire in some places. And sometimes I feel I have to move toward it. Because if I don’t, something in me goes quiet and silence doesn’t belong in Gaza. Not now.

[00:12:56] So I say it clearly: It is unnatural to kill children for being hungry. It is unnatural to shoot a child in the spine because you walked near a food truck. It is unnatural to erase a family for the crime of standing in line for aid. And if we allow that to become natural, if we flinch and say nothing, we are no longer witnesses, we are participants. And we will deserve the severity of history’s judgment.

[00:13:30] Presenter: Dr. Mark Brauner shares his experience at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, and Bo Beaver announces the release of her cousin Windfield, after the Israeli Occupation Forces intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla, preventing humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza.

You can explore Todd Boyle’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ToddBoyle.