Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

On Thursday, after having two cups of cardamom-flavored coffee and finishing Wordle (3/6), my column deadline approached and I struggled to make sense of interconnected conflicts and tragedies unfolding in Washington and the Middle East.

In Washington, a woman of color, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a former refugee of Somali descent who reportedly learned English by watching American TV and who is the first African-born member of Congress and the only House Foreign Affairs Committee member who’s lived in a refugee camp, has just been politically lynched for believing, as Archbishop Tutu believed, as I believe, as millions of others believe, that Israel has become an apartheid state, a land where only some residents have rights based on their religious affiliations and practice.

The reality is that Israel has become a land where Palestinian territories have become Bantustans, where land is stolen from farmers, olive trees uprooted, water denied, health care limited, homes destroyed, and systems of control over people who have little say in their governance.

A land where, according to a UN Human Rights Committee report in 2022, “the widespread practice of arbitrary arrest and detention of Palestinians, including journalists, human rights defenders and children ... subjugates Palestinians to oppression and strips them of any sense of human rights and dignity.”

“I am especially urging the [Presbyterian General] Assembly to adopt the overture naming Israel as an apartheid state through its domestic policies and maintenance of the occupation,” the late Archbishop Tutu wrote in 2014, “and the overture calling for divestment of certain companies that contribute to the occupation of the Palestinian people...”

I am in agreement with those sentiments, in agreement with Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, in agreement with Israel’s most prominent human rights group, B’Tselem, in describing Israel’s governance of Palestinians as apartheid.

In the Middle East, since New Year’s Day, at least 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, including militants and civilians. Those casualties follow a year, 2022, where more than 150 Palestinians, including militant gunmen, armed attackers and unarmed civilians, were killed in the occupied territories, nearly all by Israeli forces.

Last week, the day after an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in Jenin that killed 10 Palestinians, a Palestinian gunman criminally opened fire on worshippers at a synagogue in Neve Yaakov, an illegal settlement built on land Israel illegally annexed in Palestinian East Jerusalem after the 1967 war. The terrorist attack killed seven Israelis.

Those issues — that violence, those deaths — are connected. The distinctions and narratives defining them are important. Today, understanding how interrelated those events are, how important it is to support oppressed and minority communities as intersectional allies, wherever they are, is central to the survival of democracy, whether in Israel/Palestine or America.

As in nature, democracy thrives in diversity and pluralism, in light and love, in embracing the sojourner, in comforting the Samaritan at the side of the road.

As we rightly condemn all violence that takes innocent lives, whether at Neve Yaakov or The Tree of Life Synagogue, whether in Christchurch or Brasilia, at Mother Emanuel, Jenin, or at the U.S. Capitol, we must understand that every death, every violent confrontation, moves a people further from their capacity for inclusion and peace and limits their ability to confront the inequalities and injustices in society that are central to poverty and oppression.

No nation, no people, are today free of the pernicious dangers of religious nationalism, nativism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, prejudice against LGBTQIA+ peoples, all common tropes deployed by demagogues to mobilize their followers and consolidate their power.

Used by demagogues to drive fear of The Other, to deny that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

“Those behind the effort to remove Ilhan Omar claim that she’s bigoted against Jews. Her Democratic defenders counter that the real bigots are those Republicans seeking to oust a Black Muslim woman. Yet neither side is talking much about what Ms. Omar has actually done on the committee from which she may soon be removed. That’s too bad. Because what Ms. Omar has done is extraordinary,” Peter Beinart, editor at large of Jewish Currents, wrote in the New York Times.

“Ms. Omar’s detractors might say all this reflects her anti-Americanism. They’re wrong. Ms. Omar speaks idealistically about “the moral authority the United States carries on the world stage when we stand up for human rights.” She just recognizes — as do many across the globe — that the United States doesn’t exercise that moral authority nearly as often as our leaders claim.”

Omar understands, as Archbishop Tutu has written, that “Those who turn a blind eye to injustice actually perpetuate injustice. If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

“I am a survivor of war, and I understand personally how it takes lives, shatters futures and tears apart families,” Rep. Omar said in 2021. “I also know the moral authority the United States carries on the world stage when we stand up for human rights. We have an opportunity to live up to these values, to ensure that no child lives through violent conflict like I did, and to mean what we say when it comes to championing human rights worldwide.”

It is not Ilhan Omar who lost the vote in Congress.

It is America.

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