‘MORAL INJURY’: Murdered In Gaza, Disappeared In America

It’s the concept that violence and injustice have more victims than the directly victimized. And can affect how we function and are able to fight back when we participate in, witness, or fail to prevent something of intolerable evil.

By Abba Solomon

Moral injury is the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one’s core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty.
“Moral Injury” – Psychology Today, emphasis added.

I became interested in the term “moral injury” when I read of suicides of IDF soldiers who have served in Gaza. One reservist who committed suicide by self-immolation is quoted as saying, “I smell and see burning bodies all the time.“

It’s the concept that violence and injustice have more victims than the directly victimized. And can affect how we function and are able to fight back when we participate in, witness, or fail to prevent something of intolerable evil.

Part of the horror is doubting that the values ever existed. Certainly the inmates of the most incarcerated nation on earth – the USA – might have different attitudes to the claims of minimal justice, fairness.

We are in a season of injustice and cruelty. Do fascist periods occur like seasons? Is there a periodicity?

The quote that is attributed to Voltaire – that belief in absurdities leads to atrocities – is being acted out, stupidly.

We’re now exposed – often in real-time – to video of abducted mothers torn from their children, workers taken at their jobs, green card holders handcuffed when reporting to ICE appointments, in the USA – and to videos of people in Gaza shot, burned, or bombed, or herded, starving, from blasted place to blasted place by pitiless IDF operations in a not so hidden logic of extermination.

The displaced and bereaved in Gaza, and the disappeared in America, are not the only ones experiencing injury. We who witness and cannot stop it also lose confidence in our ability to effectively support decency and justice, or be confident that we live in a world of such things.

Unlike trauma from an accident or natural disaster, this “moral injury” is to our social sense – what we can expect from our society. Masked, heavily armed men grabbing men, women, children, brutalizing them as if they were enemies, on our streets, and knowing they are government agents, bruises our sense of moral order.

Judith Levine in The Guardian wrote,

The colossal buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will create the largest domestic police force in the US; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI. Ice will be bigger than the military of many countries. When it runs out of brown and Black people to deport, Ice – perhaps under another name – will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize and disappear anyone the administration considers undesirable.

There is no doubt of our direction. Billions have been appropriated to build detention for ICE targets. Random exile to a torture prison in El Salvador and a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades making it clear that arbitrary abuse and inhumanity is the intention. Government terror.

Every day has a new horror. A video of a huge ICE raid in a strawberry field in California’s Central Valley, terrorizing workers, shows “rounding up” of 100.

The United States government is overtly voicing white supremacy, of a “pure” historic “Homeland,” more suited to 1925.

The Vice President has proposed the idea that ancestral pedigree should add a qualitative weight in American discourse.  Mr Vance has complained that Uganda-born New York City mayoral candidate Mamdani is “ungrateful.”  The President campaigned with a complaint of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the US.

“Legality” and due process is gone, in a country of ICE snatch gangs grabbing anyone who speaks a “foreign” language, has some profession or marker of “alienness,” terrorizing swaths of the American community, tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The following are two posts from the US Department of Homeland Security:

The stupidity and vulgarity of this government department harkening to an imaginary “white” American kitch is unbearable.

(Their vacuous, absurd Hollywood America elides

• slaughtered and dispossessed native peoples of North America;

• Africans enslaved and shipped as livestock, their destiny as sub-human chattel, stigmatized to this day;

• Spanish-speaking citizens of territory subsumed into the United States in 1848;

• generations of “undesirable” immigrants, each scorned as they did useful work.)

MAGA erasure of transgender people mirrors the 1933 Nazi burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex Research library nearly 100 years ago – and the Nazi purge of “Jewish degeneracy” in German scholarship is mirrored in the purge of “woke influences” in universities.

Am I – secular non-Zionist Jew with roots in Brooklyn, descendant of the Jewish Great Migration 120 years ago from Eastern Europe – part of the “Homeland” they work to protect with all the powers and monopoly of violence of the federal government? I’m not without fear for my life and comforts. And nauseated that by skin color and class I am part of what they “protect.”

In my Jewish immigrant culture, weaned on the stories of the Holocaust and of Eastern European persecution, we are warned to be alert for what might come to us.

In a mendacious way, this Administration has taken up antisemitism as a cause, mixing Judaism with Zionism, and casting resistance to the Israeli state as terrorism.  (Euro-centric Americanism is yoked to a Jewish supremacist concept of Palestine.) I may easily be not who they “protect,” but who they target as a terrorism advocate.

Absurd, stupid.  Not without precedent. Both Mussolini and Hitler and their appointees were comical, but it didn’t matter, they managed deadly transformations of their societies for a time.  That’s why I wonder about periodicity – that it’s a time of fascism, much as a season.

The President on July 24 issued an “executive order” declaring unhoused people a threat to public order, and saying the “vast majority” of them are drug addicts or mentally ill, and declaring public policy to “clear them” from public spaces into detention by “civil commitment.”

Unquestionably, this administration is choosing the most vulnerable people – immigrants, those without housing, transgender people – to target, and has shown that it intends to deprive human rights of those it stigmatizes. We can Niemöller the trend from here.

Once we’ve created concentration camps like “Alligator Alcatraz” and many other unofficial miserable holding sites for people beyond the law’s protection, the only question is the rate of further construction – and the funding has been voted.

Six months in, the confidence with which the Trump administration has turned the guiding philosophy of government from aspirations to equality to criminalization of non-whiteness – unleashing of police power, contempt of any sort of  “queer” non-conformity, prioritization of a standard “white” model of American, and mockery of scholarship – makes me feel there is a momentum that is… tidal, and as King Canute demonstrated, impervious to commands to fall back before its fullness is reached.

Abba A. Solomon is the author of “The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel” and “The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech ‘The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews,’ Given to the Baltimore Chapter, American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948.”