They Will Never Make Me Hate You

In front of my own eyes is a parent’s whole universe brought to a halt and my entire political structure begging me to be OK with it.

American warmongering always follows a formula, carefully crafted by the political elite who I have nothing in common with. I will probably never own a house as big as theirs, if I own one at any point at all. If I lose my job, I worry about being able to provide enough for myself. I worry about my two immediate family members who rely on government assistance to get by. I get headaches from the prices of groceries — not only for myself but on behalf of those around me. I hope to God I never have an extended hospital stay, because for the masses that is a debt sentence, or sometimes a death sentence. They have nothing in common with me, but tell me that I should hate you — the people of Gaza.

The formula starts with giving us reasons to shrug off your death and your suffering. They will tell us all that “terrorists” hide in the bowels of your hospitals and elementary schools and that’s why they must be bombed. They will point to a baby, with plump little cheeks laying dead in their footsie pajamas on the floor of a hospital and say “Hamas started it”. Forget how little the average American would know about Hamas besides what the powerful have told them — I don’t see a dead baby and ask who started it. I would only ask who had killed the baby. In front of my own eyes is a parent’s whole universe brought to a halt and my entire political structure begging me to be OK with it.

This is the cycle of my country’s warfare. They tell us who to hate, and then they bomb and kill people for as long as they like — until their pockets are stacked with cash and the blood pools at their feet. They can all afford new shoes, and new pants if the hems get stained. So they rinse and repeat these tactics. They did this with Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and now they are doing it with you. They tell us the videos we see of children dying in their mother’s arms are a natural result of the actions of adults around them. Like we, the people, can justify the killing of children as easily as they can. But many of us haven’t sold our souls to anyone like they have.

They try and give up our conscious for free, and you’d think all these free market capitalists would know better — we have no incentive to give up our humanity for nothing in return. We, in less harsh terms, will find ourselves at the other end of the ruling class’ barbarity if we haven’t already. For many of us, it’s easier to see ourselves in your shoes than theirs — even if the average American hopes to be rich and powerful one day, that possibility eventually slips from between their fingers. It always does, and the arc of history is pulling us towards you all, not the people that are trying to wipe you out. It’s only the rich and powerful that try and claim our sympathy for you is a fridge, unpopular idea. The ones who have hearts for people who are starved and slaughtered are the normal ones. It’s not strange to be against bombing hospitals.

Unluckily for the ruling class here, the globalized world they’ve built to attain cheap labor and higher margins also drew the world closer. An American can be on the phone with someone in Gaza and hear the helicopters hovering above their friends’ heads like she were in Dier al Balah herself.

Gaza is the test of my lifetime. The American public is shifting towards sympathy for you, Palestine. Our ruling class cannot stand it, and they are taking it out on you. And they are, to a significantly less cruel extent, beginning to take it out on people here, too.

Unluckily for them too — is that their cohort shrinks and shrinks as the margins in my country get wider and wider. I see the ruling class eating itself as it brazenly tries to defend the mass slaughter of your children. I know you see what gets put in my country’s media about you, and what is justified in this genocide they market to us as a “war” between two equal parties. I know the loudest people in my country are the ones that justify your murder. Just know, it will never work on me. It won’t work on plenty of us. They pay billions of dollars to put up propaganda to destroy your image. Videos you post of children playing and families smiling obliterates their image of you and replaces it for free. They could never, ever make me hate you.

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Danaka Katovich is CODEPINK’s National Co-Director.

Danaka graduated from DePaul University with a bachelor's degree in Political Science in November 2020. Since 2018 she has been working towards ending US participation in the war in Yemen. At CODEPINK, she oversees all advocacy campaigns and facilitates our local organizing in the Midwest and in Europe. Her writing can be found in Jacobin, Salon, Truthout, CommonDreams, and more. You can read more of her writing here.