\u201cI CAN\u2019T BREATHE \u2013 LET ME BREATHE!\u201d \u2013<\/strong><\/p>\n Shouted 80-year-old Israeli hostage Gadi Moses into the crushing crowd of HAMAS terrorists and civilian gawkers on Thursday in Khan Yunis, on his 482nd day of captivity since October 7th, as he was frog-marched to the Red Cross van to his freedom.<\/p>\n This cry immediately brought back the terrible refrain of George Floyd as a Minneapolis police officer leaned on his neck for 8 interminable minutes on 25 May 2020, that set off nation-wide riots and reflection in the wake of murder. [It wasn\u2019t the first time this stifled scream had reverberated either \u2013 it was also the final words of the Eric Gardner as he was suffocated in a choke-hold by the NYPD in July 2014.] In the violence of Floyd\u2019s death, he gave us a new vocabulary to fight injustice everywhere.<\/p>\n \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe\u201d soon became the slogan of activism, of resistance, and of speaking truth in the face of power \u2014 so much so it was printed on T-shirts, painted on street murals, and became a hashtag on social media.<\/p>\n Ultimately, it became an international cri de coeur heard around the world \u2014 including adopted by the Palestinians as part of their call for liberation.<\/p>\n But how could the struggle from Minneapolis to Palestine lead to this?<\/p>\n The images from the hostage release should shock the conscience of everyone who resists oppression, inequality, and racism around the world. This is not the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, this is the arc of the universe bending toward shame and savagery.<\/p>\n I wonder if the world watching television or millennial progressives scrolling on social media look at these images of terrified young women and a determined elderly man paraded through lynch mob of masked men and jeering and leering civilians (including women and children filming on their phones) and think to themselves: have we been supporting the wrong side?<\/p>\n Does it cross their minds that their occupations of the quad, street protests, and media campaigns led to this moment?<\/p>\n That all the \u201cgood humanitarians\u201d \u2014 the International Red Cross, the United Nations, and the NGOs \u2014 have conspired in this brutality beamed around the world on state-sponsored terrorist TV of Al-Jazeera?<\/p>\n That their accusations of starvation, dehumanization, and even attempted genocide truthfully apply to the frail and flummoxed hostages experiencing one last act of total violation and humiliation on their way home?<\/p>\n [Do they stop to think that Shiri Bibas and her two children Kfir (2) and Ariel (5) are still there? And more elderly men, fathers, sons, brothers, partners, and friends, including US citizens, who may only come home in a coffin?]\n I can\u2019t breathe watching these images because my faith in the fundamental righteousness of Palestinian statehood has been shaken by their monstrousness and villainy. Humans that take 80-year-old men, young women, (and babies) hostage are people who simply do not understand the meaning of justice or freedom. They are thugs who abuse theories of rights, citizenship, and equality. HAMAS and its supporters (including civilians who joined this cruelty today and for the past 482 days as accomplices in the hostage-taking, torture, and murder of over 1200 civilians) are not members of a brotherhood of men \u2014 they are members of death cult.<\/p>\n Gadi Moses, hope against hope, returned to his family today on his own two feet \u2014 pushed through the crowd with the dignity of his white-haired head held high. Arbel Yehud, manhandled by the same men who may have mistreated her in unimaginable ways for the past 14 months, made her way toward freedom. Agam Berger, alone on a stage, stared down swarms of men who didn\u2019t have the courage to reveal their own faces, with superhuman strength to survive.<\/p>\n But if this is what from Minneapolis to Palestine is to mean \u2014 so many deaths have been in vain. This is perversion of justice that so many struggles for freedom \u2014 from American civil rights to South African apartheid \u2014 have embodied.<\/p>\n There have been many jugs of ink spilled on the end of allyship after October 7th and how former companions in just causes \u2014 from racial equality, to feminism, to climate change \u2014 turned their backs on the Jewish community. That a history dating back to 1967 has now culminated in a definitive parting of ways of Zionism and the Left and the complete subordination of identity politics toward Palestinian liberation. But today need not be the end of history \u2013<\/p>\n I hope that the scenes of incontrovertible inhumanity are a watershed moment about the future of \u201cFrom the River to the Sea\u201d \u2014 that some people doom-scrolling and channel-surfing may finally admit to themselves that this has taken their own breath away and they are now gasping for air as much as grasping at straws about what solidarity can mean in the face of such sadism.<\/p>\n Martin Luther King Jr. preached that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice \u2014 may today be that moment of inflection that will bring us closer to our ideals as civilized people.<\/p>\n