Standing Up for Gaza
Up until this week Paul Biggar was on the board at a fairly substantial tech company that he co-founded. If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard of it; if you don’t, you probably haven’t. But then he wrote a blog post:
When you read about the Holocaust and the Nazis, you like to imagine you’d be the good guy. You’d fight the Nazis, you’d free the concentration camps. But apparently I wouldn’t. Apparently I would have just sat there paralyzed, incapable of doing anything about the genocide I see every day. Unable to think of any way to help. All I can do is retweet and protest and write a stupid blog post. I feel so stupid.
And:
Pro-Israeli investors have created a culture of fear in tech where supporters of Palestinian freedom feel unable to raise their voices. I have spoken to many people in tech who are afraid that if they speak up, they’ll be unable to raise their next round, and lose 5-10 years of work on their venture, for their families and for their employees.
We must break the silence around the genocide in Gaza. I know this is a big ask. I know there are significant risks involved, and that’s not your fault. But all the same, we cannot continue to be complicit in this genocide.
He’s no longer a director of that company. The CEO, Jim Rose, has clarified that Paul does not speak for them and that CircleCI “is committed to our customers in Israel and around the world.”
In the pages of the New York Times, leaders of five major NGOs write together of Israel’s attacks on Gaza:
The right to self-defense does not and cannot require unleashing this humanitarian nightmare on millions of civilians. It is not a path to accountability, healing or peace. In no other war we can think of in this century have civilians been so trapped, without any avenue or option to escape to save themselves and their children.
They continue,
Most of our organizations have been operating in Gaza for decades. But we can do nothing remotely adequate to address the level of suffering there without an immediate and complete cease-fire and an end to the siege.
Separately, Doctors Without Borders calls it an “unmitigated humanitarian disaster” and describes Israel’s behavior as “inconsistent with international norms and laws.”
And the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus writes:
Given the living conditions and lack of health care, more people could die from disease than bombings.
We need a sustained ceasefire. NOW. It’s a matter of life or death for civilians.
This is a tremendous thing to write, in a war where the the death toll from bombing alone is already staggering.
Among defenders of the Israeli military, “ceasefire” has taken on a reputation as a codeword of uninformed and uninvolved social media activists. But the Director-General of WHO isn’t a keyboard warrior Twitter leftist. Doctors Without Borders aren’t online slacktivists trading half-baked political memes. These are professionals and experts, in some cases on the ground and literally in the line of fire. They are the people most versed in the horrific buffet of suffering the world has to offer and they are saying: this is among the worst we’ve seen and we’re calling for it to stop.
Given this united message from the humanitarian community, people shouldn’t really have to think, “that’s really complicated – who knows what the right thing to do is?” or, “I might lose my job if I speak up about this.” In reasonable world, it wouldn’t be even a little bit controversial.
Thinking about Paul Biggar this week reminds me that years ago, when Daniel Ellsberg was still alive, I had the pleasure to meet him and see him speak at a retreat for work (my job is indeed the coolest). He was the sharpest octogenarian I had ever met, speaking on a wide range of topics with clarity for exactly one hour – he didn’t even need a timer!
One thing he said that stuck with me was on the subject of whistleblowers: as a society we train people when and under what circumstances to sacrifice their lives for a greater good – this is one of the things the military does, it shows up in stories, movies, TV – but we don’t really instill an idea of under what circumstances one should sacrifice comfort, a job, a career.
I’m sure Paul Biggar, unlike many of the whistleblowers Ellsberg was actually talking about, will be fine. I’m sure he’s not hurting for money and I doubt the industry will permanently blackball him. But I’m sure it wasn’t easy and I have a lot of respect for what it took for him to do. I think we could all do a little more of that risk-taking.
Nearly 1 out of every 100 Palestinians alive in Gaza three months ago is now dead. 20,000 people and counting. Multiples more are injured. The majority are homeless – their homes evacuated and razed. Many are starving, sick, or covered by rubble, and will die in the coming months from lack of medical care or access to the basic necessities of life – these deaths now inevitable in the terrible calculus of mortality. Every day that passes bakes more needless deaths into our future.
It’s unbearable to imagine something like this could happen to my community, if I were born on the wrong side of a border, never allowed to leave. It’s convenient to imagine that it is somehow because of who I am as a person that my life, resources, and choices have never seriously been circumscribed. That I can travel the world as I please and come home to a house – a neighborhood – that is at no risk of being flattened by a passing bomber. It’s comforting to think this happens to people far away who are not very much like me. But I know that I just got lucky.
I’m not a big believer in pressuring people to undertake specific forms of activism. I won’t tell you that silence makes you complicit – perhaps it does – I’m not comfortable determining or saying it. I know that speaking out might not be easy or possible – it might lose you friends, family, or a job. It’s a threshold I myself have failed to meet numerous times in the past. Maybe you have other skills you’re quietly using to resist the war. I get that.
Instead, this is my empathetic call to introspection. If what you’ve seen happening in Gaza horrifies you, as it should, as it does me, as it does the entire humanitarian world, are there ways you can make it harder for Israel to continue to pretend this war is moral, just, or necessary? And are you willing to risk a little more than you might have previously thought to play your part in stopping it?