What's Martin Luther King, Jr. Got to do with Gaza?
The Relevance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Principles and Analysis to Our Present Moment
On Saturday, January 13, 2024, hundreds of thousands are expected to descend upon Washington D.C. in a mass mobilization against Israel’s historically destructive war in Gaza. With more than 10,000 children killed and thousands more injured, participants intend to raise their voices for ceasefire, an end to Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and a resolution to the conflict mediated by international law.
Given growing international awareness and alarm over the dire conditions in Gaza, turnout for the demonstration is poised to exceed the already historic peace march for Gaza that took place on November 4, 2023. More than 250,000 participated in that emergency mobilization in Washington D.C., declaring opposition to U.S. material support for Israel’s war.
The January 13, 2024 march takes place the day after the International Court of Justice (ICF)—the “World Court”—concludes a preliminary hearing on South Africa's accusation that Israel is in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. South Africa is requesting that the World Court issue an injunction against Israel's use of military force in Gaza until a final judgment can be rendered on the accusation on Israel’s violation of the Genocide Convention.
The second mass mobilization fittingly occurs just two days before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The timing of this urgent demonstration is fitting because it deeply resonates with the principles and practices that Rev. King exemplified and sought to promote. Lost in platitude-ridden commemorations of King is his conception of an active, participatory justice, centered on an ethic of love, and opposition to not one but three evils: economic injustice, militarism, as well as racism. Most importantly, King’s foremost commitment was to an ethic of love that rejected systems and practices which violated the dignity of human beings—that “thingified” them.
Disease of Militarism
Rev. Dr. King was unequivocal in his condemnation of the use of massive military violence to resolve conflict. He likened militarism—lavish economic, political, and “moral” investment in warfare—to a “disease.” King admitted to viewing war as a “negative good” in his days as a student. His thinking changed as he grasped the wider implications of war, nuclear annihilation, and way in which warfare inevitably undermined fundamental human values. In a 1960 essay titled, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King explained:
“But more and more I have come to the conclusion that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons of war totally rules out the possibility of war ever serving again as a negative good. If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In a day when sputniks dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, nobody can win a war. The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”
Rev. Dr. King spoke out against the Vietnam war for at least three reasons: he believed it was an immoral allocation of limited social resources away from the needs of the poor in our nation, believed military violence violated his core ethical commitment to honoring the dignity of all persons—the love ethic, and because he believed such global war posed an existential threat to humanity itself. King called for a “revolution of values” that would “lay hands on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’”
King’s objections resounded those of anti-war thinkers like humanistic Catholic theologian, Erasmus of the Renaissance. “War is such a monstrous pursuit that it's proper only for beasts, not men,” wrote Erasmus in his book, In Praise of Folly (1511); “so crazy that even the poets suppose Furies bring it upon us; so infectious that it spreads moral corruption far and near; so unjust that it's most effectively waged by the most cruel of thieves; so impious that it's utterly detestable to Christ.”
The madness, injustice, and folly of war is all too clear as the tragedies mount from Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza. One person out of every 100 living in Gaza has been killed since Israel began its retaliatory campaign in Gaza following Hamas militants October 7th attack in Israel. Militants killed more than 1,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and took hundreds of hostages. Since then Israeli forces have killed more than 23,000 people in Gaza, including more than 10,000 children.
Oxfam has determined that Israel's military campaign is killing an average of 250 Palestinians every day. In addition to these deaths and the more than 1,000 Israelis killed in the Hamas-led attacks, 330 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank during this time. According to Oxfam, Gaza's average deaths-per-day significantly outpaces all other deadly conflict zones in the world including Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Each new day brings headlines that cry out with news of new heart-wrenching injustices: an Israeli airstrike kills a group of children in an area of Gaza “declared safe by Israel”; journalists are bombed in their car on their way to an assignment and a father is forced to mourn the death of another son less than two months after the deaths of his wife, daughter, and son; an Israeli tank attacks a U.N. convoy along the very route that same military instructed it to take; Gazan women struggle to manage their periods in a sanitary, dignified manner due to a lack of menstrual pads, running water, and access to bathrooms. Pregnant women are deprived of hygienic, humane conditions to give birth; and more than 1,000 children endure amputations without anesthesia due to Israel’s blocking of aid. And this is to say nothing of the fact Israel is presiding over a journalist death toll that exceeds that of the gravest single year figures from conflicts in Iraq (2006), the Philippines (2009), Syria (2012), Afghanistan (2018), Ukraine (2022), and Somalia (2012).1
Rev. Dr. King observed that those conducting massive military violence always have their “reasons.” Honor. Glory. Freedom. Democracy. Security. War is a necessary evil, we are told again and again; it is a terrible means required to achieve the necessary ends of peace and justice. In his 1967 sermon, “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” delivered in the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed the strange fact that those most committed to warfare deployed “peace” as their justification.
“It’s one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.”
Today, those enacting and supporting Israel’s massive military bombardment claim they are pursuing peace even as they drop 2,000 pound bombs on refugee camps and along routes where civilians were ordered to traverse. Yet claims of peaceful motives ring hollow amid a backdrop of drones, bombs, and an apocalyptic landscape of total destruction. They further ring hollow as the Israeli government actively limits the influx of humanitarian aid including vital food, water, and medical supplies.
A report on food security by the United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) concluded that the entire population of Gaza is experiencing acute food insecurity. As many as 25% of people in Gaza are now facing catastrophic "phase 5" hunger, the highest level of hunger denoted by food security monitors. According to the report, “This is the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country.” The chief economist with the United Nations World Food Program, Arif Husain, told the The New Yorker:
“this is unprecedented because of, one, the magnitude, the scale, the entire population of a particular place; second, the severity; and, third, the speed at which this is happening, at which this has unfolded, is unprecedented. In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of severity, in terms of scale, and then in terms of speed.”
To emphasize the magnitude of the situation Husain explained that Palestinians currently comprise four out of five—80%—of the world’s catastrophically (phase 5) hungry. “This is also what makes it unprecedented.”
The Israeli human rights group B'tselem reports that this crisis of hunger is not an accidental byproduct of Israel's war against Hamas militants but a product of Israel’s “declared policy.”
“Most cultivated fields have been destroyed, and accessing open areas during the war is dangerous in any case. Bakeries, factories and food warehouses have been bombed or shut down due to lack of basic supplies, fuel and electricity. Stockpiles in private homes, stores and warehouses have long since run out. In these conditions, the family and social support networks that helped residents at the beginning of the war collapsed, too.”
In reviewing satellite imagery, for example, Human Rights Watch has found evidence that the Israeli military was likely responsible for the destruction of orchards, greenhouses, and farmland during the seven-day ceasefire that began on November 24. Additionally, B’tselem points out that Israel's government also prohibits aid organizations from purchasing food from Israel, which would result in more efficient distribution, forcing them to turn to supplies in Egypt.
South Africa’s 84-page filing against Israel for violating the Genocide Convention presents the scale and comprehensiveness of Israel’s campaign in Gaza as evidence for its claim.
“Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.”’
South Africa does not endorse or diminish the egregious violations of international law committed when “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups” took hostages and killed more than 1,000 people on October 7th. South Africans insist that such crimes do not negate Israel’s obligations to adhere to International Law including the Genocide Convention.
“The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip (‘Palestinians in Gaza’).”
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at New Jersey's Stockton University, believes that Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza is a “textbook case of genocide.” Segal contends that Israel is committing three of the five acts listed under the Genocide Convention.
“1. Killing members of the group.
“2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
“3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”"
Sega argues that this is evidenced by the fact Israel has “dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza...almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there.” He also notes that “genocidal verbs” including “erase” and “flatten” in reference to Gaza "have become omnipresent on Israeli social media.”
The U.S. international law scholar, Francis Boyle, who was the first lawyer ever to win a case under the Genocide Convention from the International Court of Justice, winning two world court orders on behalf of Bosnians against Yugoslavia's genocide, believes that South Africa’s case against Israel will prevail. “Based on my careful review of all the documents so far submitted by the Republic of South Africa,” Boyle said in a January 2, 2024 interview with Democracy Now, “I believe South Africa will win an order against Israel to cease and desist committing all acts of genocide against the Palestinians.”
As early as mid-October 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies signed a public letter in the Third World Approaches to International Law Review warning “of the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” One of the signatories to the letter, Israeli historian Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, said that the South African file to the world court proved that “there are many indications if not of genocide then of genocidal acts,” as well as “war crimes and crimes against humanity” and operations of “ethnic cleansing.”
During the January 11, 2023 world court hearings, Irish lawyer Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, representing South Africa, noted the ignoble novelty of the current military assault on Gazans.
“The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people despite the overt, dehumanizing, genocidal rhetoric by Israeli governmental and military officials, matched by the Israeli army's actions on the ground. Despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian people being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers, and television screens—the first genocide in history where it's victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something. Gaza represents nothing short of a moral failure.”
Eye for an Eye, A War on All
Rev. King’s philosophy of love and non-violence is proven still more pertinent in light of the openly genocidal remarks made by leading Israeli political figures. Though international legal experts contend that intent is often the most difficult to prove regarding the Genocide Convention, Israeli State Officials and others with significant social-political influence have explicitly endorsed waging war on not only combatants in Gaza but on the entire population. In support of its claim that Israel is committing genocide, South Africa has provided just under ten pages of such statements including Israeli president, Isaac Herzog’s October 12, 2023 statement that the “entire nation” of people in Gaza bare responsibility for the October 7th attack on Israeli civilians.
“It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved. It’s absolutely not true. … and we will fight until we break their backbone.”
Just a few days earlier Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explained, in an Israeli Army situation update that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” He later told a group of soldiers that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”
Israel's Minister of Heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, suggested the possibility of a nuclear strike on the Gaza Strip and, on November 1, 2023, posted a statement to Facebook extolling the beauty of the destruction of northern Gaza.
“The north of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes… We must talk about the day after. In my mind, we will hand over lots to all those who fought for Gaza over the years and to those evicted from [the former Israeli settlement] Gush Katif.”
The day after South Africa submitted its petition, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, told a United Kingdom journalist she believes “that Gaza has an underground tunnel city and in order to get to this underground tunnel city, those areas must be destroyed.” When the journalist observed that her comments seemed to imply “an argument for destroying the whole of Gaza, every single building,” the ambassador replied, “So do you have another solution how to destroy the underground tunnel city, that this is the place where the terrorists hide...?”
Knesset member, Michal Woldiger of the Religious Zionism party, endorsed the demands of some hostage families that Israel prevent all humanitarian aid—including food and medicine—from reaching into Gaza until Hamas militants release hostages taken on October 7. “It makes no sense for us to give them goods and equipment while our hostages are still there with no signs of life. This is not how we will get them back.”
In an October 23 speech, Knesset member, Tally Gotliv, of the Likud party, explicitly endorsed using hunger and dehydration against the civilian population to extract political advances.
“Without hunger and thirst among the Gazan population, we will not be able to recruit collaborators, we will not be able to recruit intelligence, we will not be able to bribe people, with food, drink, medicine, in order to obtain intelligence, and we know that finding the abductees is a supreme and super important goal alongside the goals of fighting.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also used language that even members of his own military understand as an endorsement of targeting all Gazans. On October 28, 2023, Netanyahu told Israeli forces preparing for a land invasion of Gaza: “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” The Israeli Prime Minister references a widely known Jewish commandment—a mitzvah—derived from the Bible: to destroy Amalek. Deuteronomy (25:19) reads, “you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” In First Samuel, God instructs Saul to exact the wholesale slaughter of the Israelites' reoccurring foe, Amalek or the Amalekites.
“Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!” (Samuel 15:3)
As South Africa showed in their appearance before the world court on January 11, Netanyahu’s framing of the war was perfectly clear to his audience. On December 7, journalists recorded Israeli soldiers on the ground in Gaza dancing together in a large group and singing,
“I stick by one mitzvah, to wipe off the seed of Amalek.... We know our slogan, there are no 'uninvolved civilians.'"
Such sentiments were echoed by Florida congressman, Republican Brian Mast in 2023. “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of 'innocent Palestinian civilians,' as is frequently said. I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term 'innocent Nazi civilians' during World War II.” Elsewhere Mast also said he “would challenge anybody in here to point to me, which Palestinian is Hamas, and which one is an innocent civilian?”
One cannot help but to think of King’s analysis of the ways in which militarism and the violence and hatred it requires both fuels the conflict it seeks to extinguish and spiritually and ethically injures not those participating in the hatred and violence. In an interview that took place before the March on Washington, King explained
“hate is injurious to the hater as well as the hated. Many of the psychiatrists are telling us now that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious and many of the inner conflicts rooted in hate and so they are now saying ‘love or perish.’ Erich Fromm can write a book like The Art of Loving and make it very clear that love is the supreme unifying principle of life….”
King believed it was absurd to expect peace and justice to grow from the seeds of violence and hatred. King believed that Communist theorists, for example, undermined their ideals by embracing a “by any means necessary” approach to social change.
“In a real sense, the means represent the ideal in the making and the end in process. And so in the long run, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends, because the end is pre-existent in the means.”
Nonviolence was not only valuable as a mechanism to generate the desired goal of the civil rights movement; more fundamentally, it was a means of acting in the world that remained consistent with King’s foremost commitment to an ethic of love, honoring the human dignity of self and other.
“I’m trying to say in this movement that it is necessary to follow the technique of nonviolence as the most potent weapon available to us, but it is necessary also to follow the love ethic which becomes a force of personality integration.”
King’s understanding and campaign against racism began with a radical commitment to love rather than dehumanize his white supremacist enemies. By love, King did not mean a sentimental feeling; rather, he drew on the German-Jewish theorist, Erich Fromm’s conception of love as an activity and distinctly human capacity that facilitated grasping the deepest truths and value of life.
In his 1967 sermon, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” King said those like him who are concerned with “justice,” “brotherhood,” and “truth” cannot rationally advocate for violence.
“For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that. And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go.”
Against claims of naivete, King clearly explained that loving our “brother” did not require liking their hateful beliefs or accepting their unjust behavior. In his 1967 Christmas Sermon on Peace, King noted:
“When you rise to love on this level, you love all men not because you like them, not because their ways appeal to you, but you love them because God loves them. This is what Jesus meant when he said, ‘Love your enemies.’ And I’m happy that he didn’t say, ‘Like your enemies,’ because there are some people that I find it pretty difficult to like. Liking is an affectionate emotion, and I can’t like anybody who would bomb my home. I can’t like anybody who would exploit me. I can’t like anybody who would trample over me with injustices. I can’t like them. I can’t like anybody who threatens to kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that love is greater than liking. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men.”
King refused to allow white supremacist terrorism to deprive him of a fullness of humanity capable of recognizing the share of humanness in even those who had established themselves as his enemy. Such insight did not come at the expense of his resolve to honor his and the wider black community’s humanity. It also enabled the development of mutual understanding that continues to grow, imperfectly, in the present.
Understanding
Just as scholars and thinkers calling for a ceasefire, today, are condemned, Rev. King was roundly condemned for cutting against the political and social establishment when he delivered his groundbreaking “Beyond Vietnam” speech. In the speech, King called on the U.S. to end its bloody war on the people of Vietnam, a war that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. True to his principles, King exemplified the ethic of love—an ethic requiring love for those we're most inclined to categorize as our “other” and “enemy”—by taking time to empathize and understand rather than dehumanize and animalize the other side, the “communist” and “Vietcong.” King reflected,
“What, then, can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao, as a faithful minister to Jesus Christ? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life? Finally, I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be the son of the Living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood.”
King’s refusal to demonize his enemies allowed him to recognize the ways in which racism was used to pit poor whites against people of color. It also allowed him to see how differently American foreign policy looked from the vantage point of the North Vietnamese. Likely drawing inspiration from earlier critics of ethnocentrism or “social narcissism” such as German-Jewish thinker, Erich Fromm,2 King challenged Americans to better grasp the point-of-view of those who had taken up armed struggle against the U.S. and it's allies, and viewed U.S. interventions in Vietnam as flagrantly oppressive and paternalistic.
King is also relevant to the war on Gaza because he warned that the U.S. was, in his time, betraying its revolutionary origins and had joined other Western nations in becoming “arch anti-revolutionaries” subverting oppressed people's efforts to gain greater freedom rather than aid it. King would undoubtedly have objected to the indiscriminate killing perpetrated by Palestinian militants on October 7. Yet he would have been heartened by the humanity of nonviolent Palestinian activists participating in the 2018 Great March of Return.3 King believed that the U.S. in particular had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” King’s words painfully resound once again as our government finances and materially supplies the catastrophic and annihilatory attacks of the people of Gaza.
King recognized how difficult it was to speak out against the decision-making of his own government. Yet he insisted that massive military violence—the dropping of bombs on babies and ordinary people alike; the destruction of agricultural land, homes, infrastructure, and culture sites—not only caused unjust results for those targeted and inflamed hateful, vengeful feelings, but also inflicted spiritual sickness within the individual perpetrators and undermined the larger society’s security and wellbeing.
In his “Three Evils” speech, King observed that “Squalor and poverty scar our cities as our military might destroy cities in a far-off land to support oligarchy, to intervene in domestic conflict.” He insisted that we ask why our leaders claimed they didn't have money to help the poor but not failed to find resources to fund war abroad? Before Israel's war on Gaza it was the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, receive over $300 billion since 1951.
King was a lifelong dissenter against the doctrine that we could kill our way to peace and harmony. He challenged those of us who found it easy to mouth the words of peace and justice when little was at stake to remain committed to such principles when doing so was difficult. When we had something to lose. When our national or ethnic loyalties beckoned us to betray universal commitments to the love of all of humanity. He was forever inspired by the notion that all were equally made in the image of God and therefore also equally related to all, across geographical, political, or culture distinctions, as brothers and sisters.
Moral Courage
King endured condemnation and repudiation from allies and foes alike after delivering his best known statement against the U.S. war in Vietnam, on April 4, 1968, and called attention to the interconnectivity of racism, poverty, and warfare. Today, many voicing good-faith opposition to the historic destructiveness of the U.S. backed Israeli war on Gaza have faced condemnation, unsubstantiated accusations of antisemitism, and firings.
The timing of the march is right because those speaking out for the human rights of ordinary Palestinians are exemplifying the courage of conscience King argued for and lived. Four months after delivering his Riverside Church “Beyond Vietnam” speech and enduring the ensuing fallout, King reminded his supporters that
“cowardice asks the questions, is it safe; expediency asks the question, is it politic; vanity asks the question, is it popular, but conscience asks the question, is it right. And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular; but he must do it because it is right. And we say to our nation tonight, we say to our Government, we even say to our FBI, we will not be harassed, we will not make a butchery of our conscience, we will not be intimidated and we will be heard.”
People committed to the principle that all human beings possess inherent worth and are, therefore, entitled to just treatment as ends unto themselves will vigorously condemn the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas militants. We will decry and ethically bemoan the destruction of each and every precious non-combatant life killed on October 7, 2023. We will listen to Israeli Rada Rashed describe the terror of the attack:
“Bullets were hitting near my face. I don't know how. The girls around were shot down, and I was waiting to get hit. Then I saw a hole, like it was dug by someone. We went into it. We stayed there until the shooting stopped for a while.”
But we will not allow appeals to popular opinion or power dissuade us from equally decrying the killing of innocent Palestinians following the October 7 attack. We will decry and bemoan the destruction of each and every precious life killed on October 31, 2023, for example, when the Israeli government bombed the densely populated Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. We will not only hear but also try to truly comprehend the experience described by eyewitness, Mohammad Ibrahim, who told CNN,
“I was waiting in line to buy bread when suddenly and without any prior warning seven to eight missiles fell. There were seven to eight huge holes in the ground, full of killed people, body parts all over the place. It felt like the end of the world.”
We will also listen as Mohammad Al Aswad describes the aftermath of the bombing,
“Children were carrying other injured children and running, with grey dust filling the air. Bodies were hanging on the rubble, many of them unrecognized. Some were bleeding and others were burnt.”
Those of us in the United States will not turn a blind eye to the fact our nation is responsible for equipping the Israeli military with many of the munitions being used to take so many civilian lives. Though our democracy is far from perfect, it remains a democracy. We the people do have a voice, a vote, and the right to assemble. And though our voices are quiet next to those with great wealth and political power, we must recognize that they carry further and are more loudly heard than the voices of ordinary people outside of this country. To walk in the footsteps of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. means raising our voices, whatever the odds or consequences, in defense of the dignity of all personhood, in defense of love.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the killing of 79 journalists and media professionals, 72 of which were Palestinian. Four journalists were initially killed during Hamas' October 7th attack outside of the Gaza strip. Since then an additional 75 journalists have been killed, mostly by Israel Defense Forces (IDF). More journalists were been killed in the opening 10 weeks of the attack on Gaza “than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.”
During the Great March of Return, 214 Palestinians were killed and over 36,000 injured, with over 8,000 of those injuries resulting from live ammunition. Israeli snippers fired on thousands of protestors from the wall. The UN found evidence that Israel fired upon journalists, children, and disabled persons. Multiple snipers offered candid details to Haaretz about their experience firing at the knees of Palestinian protestors who approached the border wall between Israel and Gaza. The snipers described the difficulty of hitting knees and the sense of achievement they felt in increasing their numbers.