Dead and Divine and Brother of All

Good Friday

At some point during this genocide in Gaza, the closing lines from Walt Whitman’s American Civil War poem A Sight in Camp in Daybreak Gray and Dim began to haunt me daily as I took in the photos and videos I wished I had never seen. 

Man or woman, or boy or girl, an impossible number of faces, all suffused with horror and sorrow, and longing and suffering, Whitman’s words are with me:

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

And here again he lies, Whitman says. The unendingness of it, not only in the numbers and scale but also in its timelessness, its eternity, and its humanity and divinity.

But, if in their death and destruction, in their torment and terror, I see divinity, am haunted by it, then what is in those who murder, defile and desolate, including those who supply and support the genocide? 

I purposefully have avoided using the words good and evil in the 15 years I have spoken publicly about war and peace. Perhaps it seems odd and incongruent, yet I have found not much use for those words. These last months have changed that perception, and as I recognize those killed in Gaza as martyrs, I class not especially as evil those who are carrying out the bombing and starving. It is those who lie and cover for the murderers, those who allow and profit from this genocide, that I call evil.

I was present at the UN Security Council last week as the US introduced a ceasefire resolution that permitted the Israelis to continue to kill under the banner of humanitarianism. It is in these lies I see the greatest inhumanity: a willingness to enable an ethnic cleansing while calling it something else. Empowering and equipping a genocide and stating the weapons and munitions are for self-defense… starvation, something that can’t be helped. I see those men and women who sit at that table in Manhattan and those behind the podiums in Washington, DC, and I know them as evil.

It is Good Friday today, the evening. Whitman’s words carry a harder and deeper resonance. However, I do not wish on this most holy of days to feign a belief I do not have, although it is one I aspire to. I do not believe in the risen Christ. Maybe someday I will, I would greet Him eagerly. 

While I don’t recognize divinity as from resurrection, I realize and comprehend it in the martyrs of our shared human history. A lone Palestinian Jew was crucified in Jerusalem by an occupying power 2000 years ago and a six-year-old Palestinian Muslim boy was starved to death by an occupying power yesterday in Gaza City. Their deaths, the cost of opposition to Empire, and their betrayals, for the same reasons of money and power, are as human as any condition. Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? Their martyrdoms haunt our species just as Whitman’s words haunt my impossible prayers for their relief. 

Again, they lie. In their faces I see the same death, the same divinity, and I know them. They are my brothers. 

Mohammed Naeem al-Najar, aged six, starved to death by the American and Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. March 28, 2024.