Too often it takes the clarity of hindsight for us to acknowledge that an injustice has taken place.
Certainly that was the case for the Japanese American community, who, in what is now widely recognized as a stain on our country’s history and a grave violation of civil rights, were incarcerated en masse by the U.S. government during World War II under the pretense of protecting national security.
It took decades of activism and advocacy by Japanese Americans and others to finally get the government to acknowledge the imprisonment of 120,000 people — two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens — was wrong.
It wasn’t until 1988 that the U.S. apologized and issued some semblance of reparations for those imprisoned who were still alive to receive it. And even today, whenever I write about my family’s incarceration experience, I inevitably get responses that try to rationalize a wrong. “The U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor, we had to defend ourselves,” they argue.
Putting aside the fact my family was also part of the “we” in that equation, I would hope that those of us who care about humanity and justice would be able to speak up while an injustice is happening — not 40 years later when it was too late to stop the suffering.
It was the need to heed that call in the moment that prompted Oakland, Calif., author Maggie Tokuda-Hall to write a poignant, personal essay from her vantage point as a Japanese American and a Jew for the Seattle-based Japanese American history preservation organization Densho, titled “Justifying the Unjustifiable: Why Japanese Americans Must Stand with Palestine.”
Tokuda-Hall’s family, which has deep roots in Seattle, was incarcerated during World War II. She wrote the book “Love in the Library” about her grandparents who met at Minidoka during the war. She intentionally did not start the story with Pearl Harbor, writing in her Densho essay, “a justification for the unjustifiable will always minimize the cruelty, absurdity, and violence of the disproportionate reaction. It will also minimize the pain of survivors — sure you were uncomfortable, but what was the US supposed to do, not defend itself? — and treat their lives as acceptable collateral damage.”
Tokuda-Hall wrote that as a Japanese American and as a Jew, “It is with these two facets of my own identity in harmony that I feel a deep sense of obligation to speak clearly about what is happening in Gaza right now.”
What is happening is a staggering loss of Palestinian life, with over 17,000 dead mostly from Israeli bombs, 70% of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials. The New York Times reported more women and children were killed in Gaza in less than two months than by the U.S. and its allies in the first year of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The humanitarian crisis for civilians in the tiny strip of land was called a “catastrophe” by the U.N., with little access to food, water, shelter and fuel leading to disease and an increasingly desperate search for basic human necessities.
Tokuda-Hall said in an interview last week that while it can be intimidating to speak these truths, it is a “paramount calling” that we must. Unlike other wars where Americans can say it has nothing to do with us, the war in Gaza is different. “The United States has everything to do with this conflict,” she said. “We fund it, we give huge amounts of weapons to it. And so we don’t have the luxury of apathy here.”
The history of persecution, genocide and antisemitism toward Jews undergirds why Tokuda-Hall believes she must speak out. “We’re a people who should be the No. 1 advocates for nonviolence on the state level, because we understand what happens when violence towards a single group is rationalized within a majority,” she said.
The Israeli government’s justification for the colossal loss of Palestinian life is the horror of Oct. 7, when Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis — including many women and children — and took hundreds hostage. The atrocities of that day continue to be revealed, with recent reports documenting unconscionable sexual violence against women and girls, war crimes that should be denounced by all.
We should all be able to unreservedly condemn Hamas targeting civilians in their homes, the taking of hostages and sexual violence. We should also all be able to unreservedly condemn Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, blockade of water and food, the killing of journalists and aid workers, and the displacement of 1.8 million people. We all should — and must — loudly reject antisemitism, Islamophobia and conflation of people and governments.
As Tokuda-Hall wrote in her essay, “Grave injustice can always be rationalized in the moment, though it can rarely bear the scrutiny of even a vague attempt at rigorous hindsight.”
One of the many things that makes Tokuda-Hall proud of her Jewish identity is the invitation to question things. “When you’re a child and you participate in Seder, the youngest one is the one responsible for asking the four questions … And that kind of philosophical and spiritual rigor is something that’s really precious and wonderful to me,” she said.
It’s that rigor that propels her to speak now.
“We should be able to see [Palestinian] humanity with the exact clarity with which we wish others had seen ours,” after Kristallnacht and after Pearl Harbor, she wrote. “All these incidents are different in important ways, but the events that followed share a common theme: the complete abandonment of justice,” Tokuda-Hall wrote. “There is simply no reasonable rationalization for injustice.”