US Elections : the Democratic National Convention and the Palestinian question

Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedic surgeon. He practices in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

“Unfortunately, professional obligations prevented me from being with all of you today. Nevertheless, I would like to add to what my colleagues have no doubt told you about what they saw in Gaza.

From March 25 to April 8, I volunteered at European Hospital in Khan Younis. What I saw there was truly shocking. The cruelty being visited upon the people of Gaza, and especially on Gaza’s children, remains incomprehensible to me. Never before have I seen a small child shot in the chest and then in the head, and I could never have imagined I would see two such cases in less than two weeks. Never before have I seen a dozen small children screaming from pain and terror crowded into a trauma bay smaller than my living room, their burning flesh filling the space so aggressively that my eyes started to burn.

I could never have imagined what a hospital looks like when it becomes a displaced person’s camp. I still cannot fathom how Palestinian physicians and nurses, hunted by the Israeli military for no reason other than their incredible selflessness and steadfastness, continue to work day-in and day-out in these apocalyptic conditions.

And worst of all: I could never have imagined that my government would be supplying the weapons and funding that keeps this horrifying slaughter going, not for one week, not for one month, but for nearly an entire year now.

To this day, I wear my late father’s mezuzah around my neck. Since returning from Gaza, I have also draped a keffiyeh over my shoulders. There is no contradiction. The culture and values my father bestowed upon me require that I help those being trampled underfoot by a cruel and sadistic military superpower. Those same values compel me, without a moment’s hesitation, to demand that my government stop aiding and abetting this genocidal violence.

Israel is using my cultural heritage to justify the unjustifiable, to excuse the inexcusable. Sadly, my own government is going along with this charade. Meanwhile, the children of Gaza pay the price in spilled blood and innocence lost. Their mothers and fathers stare at me in my nightmares, silently asking why I didn’t save their children from a state that assaults them in my name, using weapons my own government willingly supplies.

I hope, one day soon, I will return to Gaza and begin reanimating limbs like I have done in so many other parts of the world for decades. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. For the good of the Palestinians, for the good of the United States, for the good of Israel, for the good of Judaism, for the good of international law, and for the good of all of humanity: stop arming Israel.”

« I just finished reading “Slavery by Another Name” by Douglas Blackmon. He describes in excruciating detail how black Americans were quite literally reenslaved after the Civil War. The story has its subtleties to be sure, but the long and short of it is this: southern elites knew that slavery was wrong and illegal, but decided to throw African-Americans back into bondage anyway.

It was obvious that this would require tremendous moral compromise and degradation of their society. Lies and deceit were kept at the ready any time a federal official was nearby. Documents had to be forged and destroyed. Money had to be paid to thugs and gangsters from the public coffers. Beatings had to be meted out. Murder of those who refused to go along with this crazed and barbaric social enterprise had to be normalized. And an entire people had to be continuously dehumanized, to ever increasing degrees, justifying ever increasing cruelty towards them. Put simply, the south collectively, although probably unconsciously, went insane. Lying became a virtue, murder became justice, ignorance became laudable, and closed mindedness became the public spirit. 

I don’t know how or when it started, but I can’t help but see the same collective moral depravity taking hold throughout our country today. On one day the president of the United States decries the bombing of a hospital in Ukraine, and on the next is silent about the total destruction of dozens of hospitals in Gaza. On one day American pundits decry the unconscionable killing of hundreds of children by Russia, and the next day are silent about the slaughter of tens of thousands of children with our own weapons. On one day the United States governments’ own research bureau declares a famine has taken hold in northern Gaza, and the next day our government sends more weapons to those who deliberately bar food from being delivered to starving families. 

I was in Gaza from March 25-April 8, and saw firsthand this genocidal violence. I saw children’s heads smashed to pieces by bullets we paid for, not once, not twice, but every single day. I saw the outrageous, systematic destruction of the entire city of Khan Younis. If there is a single room with four walls left in the entire city I couldn’t tell you where it is. I saw mothers mix what little formula they could find with poisoned water to feed to their newborns, since they were so malnourished themselves that they could not breastfeed. I saw children who cried not out of pain, but because they wished they had died along with their families instead of being burdened with the memory of their siblings and parents charred and mutilated beyond recognition. All, of course, by American ordinance. 

I just returned from work in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Even in Burkina, one of the poorest and most isolated places in the world, as soon as I mentioned Gaza people asked: why is America doing this? Why is America helping Israel to demolish an entire society, to cut down children by the tens of thousands, to starve, to torture, and as we’ve seen in the past few weeks even to commit gang rape. In the simple fashion of a genuinely confused person, more than once I heard the question: “wouldn’t it be better not to do these things?”

My answer is yes: it would be better not to do these things. An arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups is not a radical idea. Israel has decided to obliterate Gaza. Indeed, it has largely already accomplished this, thanks to the astronomical support from our own government. But there are still a million children in Gaza, and they need not die. The only thing that can save them is if we end our modern collective insanity, and stop participating in the heartless and cruel destruction of Gaza. Stop arming Israel. »

My name is Thaer Ahmad. I’m an emergency medicine physician based in Chicago. I’m also a volunteer physician who went to Gaza in January and was turned back in May after the Israeli military stormed the border between Egypt and Gaza and turned all the humanitarian aid convoys away and shut down that access.

What is your point of view on the democrat’s convention who take place in Chicago this week?

I feel, to be frank, disgusted, disappointed that this is such a celebratory atmosphere. I think this can be an important convention if the people who are organizing would be more serious about what’s taking place in the world, what’s taking place in Gaza, specifically understanding the failed policies that have been implemented over the last 10 and a half months, and trying to figure out a new way to move forward.

People are upset, and it’s not just Arab or Palestinians or Muslims. It’s progressives, human rights activists, humanitarians, it’s the left. People want to see something different happen. People have recognized the hypocrisy. And I’m just surprised that this convention is trying to have their cake and eat it too where it’s like, “ok, we hear you guys, we know that this is a problem” but no accountability, no action, no concrete steps of.  Empathy is not going to carry any children out of Gaza to get medical care. Empathy is not going to bring back the people who’ve died. It’s accountability that needs to be implemented to save lives. It’s the fact that we need to be more responsible, and we need to be morally consistent. How is it okay to be hypocritical in the way that we’ve been hypocritical over the last year? We’re outraged at the children’s hospital that was bombed in Ukraine. I was outraged. I was disgusted by that. But how come when Gaza’s hospitals are being ransacked, raided, destroyed, their doctors are being killed and arrested and abducted, that there’s justifications that I hear from people here who are at this convention, who spoke yesterday, justifications about why it’s okay to just absolutely wreck a hospital where kidney failure patients can’t get dialysis and kids can’t get chemotherapy if they have cancer. Unfortunately, this convention has just been another attempt to whitewash what’s happening. That’s not going to work. People are really scarred by what’s happened. We want to see action. And if we don’t see it, there’s going to be consequences to that. There’s an election in November. It’s a very important election. If you believe it’s an important election and you’re an organizer for the DNC (democrats national convention) or you’re the candidate for the presidential election or you’re on the ballot, act serious about this and do something different. Show us why you deserve our vote. It’s early on. We’ll see what happens over the next couple of days.

But I haven’t heard anything that would suggest that there’s going to be a change in policy.

There is, inside the convention, mobilization through the delegates with the uncommitted vote and outside the convention with demonstration again the genocide. What do you think about uncommitted vote, and will you attempt to the demonstration on Thursday?

I went to the demonstration yesterday. I’m going to go on Wednesday.

I’m going to go on Thursday. On Wednesday, we’re going to do a lecture series about the health care crisis in Gaza. The uncommitted movement come from people, everyday Americans, who wanted to organize because they felt like they were not being heard.

And that they didn’t see anybody that represented how they felt when it came to the elections. Nobody was willing to have the moral fiber or the courage to be able to say what’s happening in Gaza is wrong, our policies have been incorrect, and we want to change it moving forward. I’m glad that there are delegates that have showed up, who are going to fight a very tough fight. They’re going to get a lot of pushbacks. The uncommitted delegates, they are going to have a lot of criticism. There’s going to be people pressuring them. Harris delegates that are demanding an arms embargo, they are going to get backlash because of that. But to me, it’s just a testament to what the people want. It’s time to listen to these people and to respond to what they’re saying. Not just smile in their face, not just put them in a room in the corner of the convention center. To give them a platform and allow them to influence policy. That’s why I’m going to be at the protests. We’re going to yell as loud as we can, and we hope that people will hear us. And if they don’t hear us today, we’ll be back tomorrow. And if they don’t hear us this week, we’ll be back next week. This is not going to go away. There’s no number of speakers that are going to try to convince us, “hey, this is the right fight, join us, join us, join us. «We’re not going to join for free. We’re not cheap. What’s happened in Gaza has changed all of us. And we want to make sure that people see, what that change looks like and how that change is going to manifest at the ballot box.

In France, the head of the SNMH-FO labor union representing the French hospital doctors, who has been very vocal about Gaza, has been prosecuted by a pro-Israel organization, requesting his revocation to ban him from practicing medicine. Can you tell us if this is an isolated case and how things go on in the United States, and if you’re aware, also in other countries, where the doctors and the nurses and basically everybody in the medical healthcare system who voice their concern about what’s happening in Gaza are also prosecuted in some ways?

The oppression and the censoring of any voices that advocate for the lives of Palestinians has been in all domains. I’m sure you’re familiar with it from journalism, and you’ve seen some of the biased reporting of mainstream media when it comes to this issue. I do think there’s a magnified censoring and oppressive environment in the medical field.

In Canada, where I work, multiple physicians have been suspended, have been placed on forced administrative leave for speaking out. In fact, I overheard some labor lawyers in Toronto one day who were sitting behind me in the park discussing this. They were saying how busy they’ve been kept by cases of Canadian healthcare workers who’ve been advocating for the lives of Palestinians being placed on forced administrative leave. Almost all of them will get reinstated because they’ll find no evidence of wrongdoing. But that process of censoring people, of suspending them for some period of time and then reinstating them is part of that fearmongering. It’s part of that creating a sense of fear of speaking out on this issue.

The hypocrisy is very painful. We spoke openly about  the war in Ukraine, about bringing patients to the hospital, about how abhorred, how horrified we were by the civilian deaths. I work at a children’s hospital. We are always very outspoken when things involve children. But on this particular issue, an issue with at least 26 times the number of children killed in a fraction of the time, we were silent. And worse than being silent, we silenced. We kept people quiet. I can recount so many colleagues of mine, including myself, who experienced that silencing from our workplaces and elsewhere. I don’t think it’s a unique incident at all. I’ve heard of it happening throughout the United States. It was certainly happening in Canada where I was working the last three years. I’m sorry to hear that’s happening to this person in France. I suspect to reach that position, this person would have already had to demonstrate skills, leadership, clinical excellence, and to hear that people are trying to suspend him because of advocacy on an issue that, frankly, if you’re not advocating for it, you probably don’t belong in medicine anyway. It’s shameful.

Many people here are talking about asking the Biden administration, asking Kamala Harris, asking the Democratic Party to take a stronger stance on the Palestinian issue and stop sending weapons to Israel and Netanyahu. We have been demanding this for months and recently they still decided to send 20 billion dollars of weapons to Israel and to Netanyahu. What do you think we should do now to go a step further to try to achieve our goal?

I don’t know. I’m not a politician. I mentioned yesterday that Médecins Sans Frontières during the Rwandan genocide said that genocide calls for an immediate radical response. That’s how I feel. We need to have an immediate radical response. I’m doing everything in my power. I flew a very long way to come here. My family and friends were asking me why I’m going:  “it’s not going to make a difference”. Nothing has made a difference so far. And maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s not going to change things today. I hope it will because, these politicians can stop this in one second by preventing arms. If their conscience woke up, they could stop it in one second just by tapping into their own humanity and conscience. I’m hoping they’ll stop it, because they want the votes of all these people for whom genocide is a red line. Any administration that supports genocide is not one they would vote for. But even if they have no conscience and this doesn’t stop the genocide, although that is the only impact I’m fighting for now, I at least hope that it will solidify these voices of truth, these documented realities on the ground for future justice because the political narrative now, particularly in the United States, is so at odds with realities, documented realities on the ground, with the findings of the international courts of justice, international criminal court, the ICJ’s findings of plausible genocide. It’s so at odds with the opinions, the statements, the advocacy of every single international humanitarian and human rights organization, including human rights organizations in Israel. And yet the U.S. continues this unconditional funding and militarization.

What happened in the United States with the encampments in the universities has played a major role in the demonstrations that have been taking place everywhere in the world. There are still demonstrations, mass demonstrations in many places today. What do you think of that movement going into the streets to put pressure on the different governments to stop sending weapons to Israel?

I believe in it. I’m part of that movement. When I’m not busy with work or other things, I’m also on the streets because I think that the voice of the people is always very important. You’re French so you understand how important this is. Every time I’ve been in Paris, there are always demonstrations.

It’s important for the people to have a voice. The really sad thing that you probably heard from a lot of the delegates and politicians here today is the fact that the majority of Democrats want a ceasefire. They support an arms embargo. But the actual policies don’t reflect that because the policies reflect the donors. The capitalist motives that really have no bearing on the well-being of the people, not just here, but also in our foreign policy. When you’re in North America, you see the homelessness, you see the poverty, you see the huge gap between the rich and the poor. You see socioeconomic differences based on ethnicity and race and these things that are systemized because of ingrained racism. Those same values that are under threat here locally in the United States are under threat in the way we handle our foreign policy. People are kind of tired of these performances on big stages, like here in the DNC, of talking about how we are the country of freedom and values of justice and human rights. Then walking just outside the doors onto the street and seeing the exact opposite of that.