Finding a Cure for Humanity’s Cancer

I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more “self-defense” (sometimes known as genocide).

From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news – from Gaza, from all across the planet – with a whiplash of guilt and naivete. What the hell do I know what it feels like to have my house, or my tent, bombed, to see my children die, to have no access to water, let alone healthcare? Is it enough to comfortably empathize with the collateral damage of this world at war?

No, no, no, it’s not.

But I empathize nonetheless, and shake to my depths with an incredulity that never goes away: “As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap.”

The words are those of Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, quoted in a recent UN report about Israel’s ongoing devastation of Palestinian hospitals and its virtually total destruction of the occupied territory’s healthcare system, including the arrest – the abduction – of hundreds of doctors and other medical professionals, who often wind up being tortured and sometimes murdered.

The UN report was released “just days after the last functioning major healthcare facility in northern Gaza, Kama Adwan Hospital, was taken out of service after a raid by Israeli military forces, leaving the population of North Gaza with almost no access to adequate health care,” according to UN News.

“Staff and patients were forced to flee or were taken into custody, with many reports of torture and ill-treatment. The director of the hospital was taken into custody and his fate and whereabouts are unknown.

“During the period covered by the report, there were at least 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, claiming significant casualties among doctors, nurses, medics and other civilians, and causing significant damage, if not complete destruction of civilian infrastructure.”

It’s virtually impossible to absorb news like this without first reducing it to an abstraction. This is something that’s happening “over there” somewhere, to people I don’t know. And soon enough the world itself – the world in which we all live – is mostly an abstraction . . . an entity separated by borders. I can read about terrible things going on in distant places, but my sense of actual connection to them is missing.

The UN News story proceeded to point out: “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.”

And here’s where my internal alarm went off. I have no disagreement with the point of the above sentence, but there’s something missing. Something crucial. Its basic point is this: When you’re waging war, hey, you still have to obey certain rules, e.g., don’t bomb hospitals without a really, really good reason. If you do, you’ve done something bad. You’ve committed a war crime.

It’s not simply that acts of war are wrapped snugly in legalese, but that war itself – in the context that births the term “war crime” – is not questioned or morally challenged. War simply exists. It’s a transcultural moral certainty. It’s part and parcel of civilization itself. Various social entities across the planet are bound to disagree and/or get annoyed with one another from time to time, and when they do – what choice do they have? – they go to war. This is just the way things are. It’s OK to kill – you just have to do so within certain rules. And mostly those rules apply to the loser, not the winner. Certainly this is true in retrospect.

And suddenly the sense of abstraction I was feeling begins to shatter. The concept of war instantly turns life itself into an abstraction. No matter that religions (see Genesis 1:27) all seem to acknowledge the preciousness of human life . . . of life itself. Most religions are also the first to send their troops – or, nowadays, their tanks and bombers – into battle.

A year ago I wrote: “We — by which I mean most of humanity — are still playing with the so-called ‘just war theory,’ the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.

“You know, violence is morally neutral — and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers. . . . The neutrality of violence can be used by anyone in a position of power.”

And, oh yeah, before you open fire, before you start killing, you have to take a spiritual step directly into the process: You have to define, and then dehumanize, the enemy. Once that happens, let her rip! The only thing stopping you now are the so-called rules of war, which allegedly protect innocent civilians and keep the whole thing reasonable. What a joke. Violence is poisonously addictive and easily expands – anywhere and everywhere.

War, as I have noted, is humanity’s cancer. Its seeming inevitability is ensconced in the global military budget. We have a few thousand nukes ready to go (“if necessary”) and thus the power to destroy all life on Planet Earth, a.k.a., ourselves. Isn’t it time to start rethinking this potential Armageddon?

We are capable of creating peace! Most of us want it, at least for ourselves, our loved ones, our community and country. We just don’t know what it is – and no, it’s not some cliché of perfect harmony. But it begins with the only rule of war that is necessary: It must never be waged again.

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