When the world is apathetic or in denial, survival depends on speaking up. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power slogan from the 1980s applies to the war in Gaza and the deaths from AIDS in Africa: Silence=Death.
The landlord who attacked and killed a member of a Palestinian family in Illinois, the man who committed the “Tree of Life” massacre in Pittsburgh, the man who killed the Jews at the D.C. Jewish Museum, and those charged with attacking the Jewish woman and her friend in the Marina have something in common: As far as I know, none of them are Jewish, Palestinian or LGBTQI.
It should be remembered that the assassin in Pittsburgh was influenced by the racist “Great Replacement Theory” that Jews are conspiring to secretly contaminate white heterosexual America with asylum seekers.
When AIDS emerged in the 1980s, thousands of people died before President Ronald Reagan even mentioned it. His press secretary joked about it, and political pundit William F. Buckley advocated for gay men to be tattooed on their buttocks and put into concentration camps. During Trump’s first term, a queer asylum seeker from Central America died in ICE detention despite pleading for treatment. More recently, Trump’s administration is targeting Haitian refugees for deportation as pet-eating vectors of AIDS.
Now that highly effective treatment and prevention is available, there is no reason to “blame the victim.” Nonetheless, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy falsely suggests that HIV does not cause AIDS and has claimed without evidence that the SARS Covid-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Most destructive of all is the sudden termination of highly effective HIV prevention and treatment programs. Researchers estimate that tens of thousands of people have already died in just a few months this year.
An activist at an AIDS conference in the 1990’s said that AIDS doesn’t only stand for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome but can also mean “America; In Denial Still.” What was being denied? Rather than care for people with AIDS, some suggested that it was caused not by a virus, but by “lifestyle choices.”
In the context of Israel and Palestine, people are afraid to confront the cruelty of the annihilation of Gaza and the attacks on Palestinians throughout the West Bank. The world clutches its collective pearls and wonders if those Jews and Arabs will ever get along while ignoring the arms sales that enable the forever war.
Twenty years ago, a Palestinian peace and justice activist explained to me that the slogan “from the river to the sea…” aims to be inclusive, not threatening. There are about 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. “Jerusalem doesn’t belong to any one group,” he shouted, “we belong to Jerusalem!”
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He was poking my chest to illustrate his points and was certainly “in my face” like a screaming queen or my own Jewish father. I think of my friend as I hold up my favorite recent banner: “From the River to the Sea… Only Peace Will Set Us Free.”
Of course, peace is not simply the cessation of killing but the rehabilitation of justice and liberation. West Bank peace activist Hamze Awawde came to speak at a San Francisco synagogue recently. A cease-fire is only the first step, he explained. “You can give something for the fever, but you have to do something for the infection.”
We also need to make room for quiet voices. At a Palestinian Israeli- “Peacemaker’s Camp,” I attended a group discussion that included a former IDF officer and his teen-age daughter. The facilitator shared the ground rules that there were to be no interruptions or crosstalk. Shortly after, he asked if the teenager wanted to talk about her view of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. She hesitantly replied that she was too young and uninformed about the issues.
Her father interrupted: “No, you’re wrong!” After taking a breath, he said, “If only I knew as much as you when I was your age.”
Old or young, Jewish or Palestinian, straight or queer, your voice is needed to stop the war, surge aid to Gaza, and free both Palestine and Israel and the world from the twin scourges of war and AIDS. War is artificial, it can be unmade. HIV is a virus, but it can also be eradicated. That’s something worth shouting about.
Left: Sasha Cuttler Right: Yael Levy at Standing Together vigil Berkeley BART
Sasha Cuttler, RN PhD, is a member of Bay Area Chapter of Friends of Standing Together, and an honorary associate professor at the School of Health Sciences University of Nottingham (U.K.)*
*For identification purposes, the views expressed are my own
