What did I do to Stop the Gaza Genocide?
May 1st, 2025 @Petersham Town Hall

I’m 63 years old, and that means I’ve lived long enough to see quite a number of wars take place around our world. Even so, I do believe that the current war on Gaza is the most terrible conflict that has taken place in my lifetime.

I acknowledge, of course, that all war is terrible, and that I have lived through wars that have cost more lives than this current conflict has thus far. Even so, I believe this war is uniquely pernicious for being a war against a civilian population.

This is not how our media frames the conflict, of course. We continue to hear about Israel’s ‘war against Hamas’ as if there were two standing armies facing off against each other, yet the statistics expose the lie very clearly.

Figures vary, of course, but I believe that everyone accepts that at least 50,000 Palestinian people have been killed since the Hamas attack of October, 2023, and over 100,000 people have been wounded. The Israeli military claims that over 17,000 of those they have killed have been militants, though it has provided no evidence to support this claim. Even if it were true though, which it almost undoubtedly is not, it would still mean that that vast majority killed were civilians.

I’m a Christian, and in Christian tradition we have a ‘just war theory’ that goes back to Saint Augustine. While the early church were all pacificists, Saint Augustine did introduce the idea that a war could be just and that people of good faith could be involved in wars under certain conditions, and one of the most fundamental of those conditions was that civilians be excluded from the conflict. Even according to the Israeli statistics, civilians – mainly women and children – make up the majority of those who have been killed (at least 65%).

Of course, the official justification for this put out by the Israeli government is that the civilians are acting as human shields for the militants yet, even if that were true, we don’t normally condone the massacre of people being used as human shields.

We know of scenes like this in bank robberies, where the robbers, attempting to escape, grab random strangers as hostages and use them to shield their escape. In such situations, we assume that the police will not simply blaze away, believing that it’s OK to kill the hostages because they were being used as human shields.

The disregard for human life in Gaza at the moment is staggering, and this is not only reflected in the killing and wounding of men, women and children, but likewise in the destruction of the country’s infrastructure. Over 165,000 residential buildings have been destroyed, along with numerous civic and educational buildings.

The estimated cost of this destruction is around $22 billion. Essential services, including health, education, water, and sanitation, have been severely affected. It’s estimated that nearly 2 million people in Gaza have been displaced, which is around 90% of the population.

Of course, I’m telling you what you already know, and I don’t know what I expect any of us to do about this. Even so, I’m haunted by the final words of the late Aaron Bushnell – the US airman who burnt himself to death out the front of the Israeli embassy in Washington last year. In a final Facebook post, he wrote:

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

So … what do we do? Well … we’re doing it, and maybe we need to be doing more. Personally, I doing a lot of praying, and I’m looking for inspiration as to what more I might be able to do.

I’m not sure how we stop this, but I do know that I want to be able to say to my grandchildren one day, “I did everything I could to stop the Gaza genocide”.