Today, Aug. 22, marks the 80th anniversary of the 1944 sinking of the Tsushima Maru, a cargo passenger ship evacuating eight elementary schools from Okinawa that was caught in the advancing U.S. and Imperial Japan war over colonies. All but 59 students of the 1,788 passengers perished from brutal elements, despair, starvation and sharks.

Despite more casualties than the Titanic, the Tsushima Maru remains largely unknown, yet its significance couldn’t be more relevant today. A placard was added to the USS Bowfin, where it’s retired at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, after Veterans for Peace reported the absence of this history in its exhibit.

Imperial Japan tried to suppress this incident because its escort convoy abandoned the survivors at sea, forbidding witnesses and survivors from sharing what happened for decades after the war ended, until survivors began speaking out in each generation Okinawa has been used or threatened by wars, particularly today with U.S. preparations to war with China.

The USS Bowfin did not purposely target a civilian ship that did have military escort due to the ongoing war, but believed it had hit a gunboat until the truth was revealed 20 years later. Regardless, the U.S. Navy did intentionally fire the torpedoes that sank the Tsushima Maru in an act of war. Calling this “an accident” would suggest that this was a chance misfortune, rather than the inevitable outcome of 20th century warfare, in which technology results in more civilian than military deaths.

To support or justify wars in the modern era is to also rationalize the mass sacrifice of noncombatants in the name of “national interests.” After witnessing the pointless slaughter of WWI, the international community outlawed war as national policy in 1928. Unfortunately, the collapse of international cooperation and the surge in nationalist militarism derailed genuine human security then, as it does today.

We see everything from food to machetes leveraged in modern genocides. However, nothing could symbolize the failure to learn from the Tsushima Maru tragedy more than the ongoing carpet-bombing of Palestinians.

Of the 17,000 Palestinian children killed by U.S.-funded, Israeli bombing since last October, more than 2,000 were babies under the age of 2, despite having nothing to do with the Oct. 7 insurgency. How did this happen before our eyes in just 10 months?

If we cannot be outraged by the tragic torpedoing of school evacuees, what else might we tolerate? To become more numb each time Israel razes another refugee camp, school or hospital only fuels the flames for future conflict and shatters our collective humanity like the scattered body fragments from Israel Defense Forces offensives.

The parallels between these two histories are many. Had the Okinawan school evacuees reached their destination of Nagasaki, would they just have been reduced to ashes by U.S. nuclear holocaust? Or, had they remained in Okinawa, would they just have been conscripted, raped or butchered along with almost one-third of the native Okinawan population?

Similarly, war has shown no mercy to Palestinians fleeing for their lives regardless of where directed, by not just armaments, but global inaction to this humanitarian disaster. Meanwhile, Israel is no safer, and families of Israeli hostages protest their government’s failed boondoggle.

Palestinians are enduring their own version of Tsushima Maru tragedies daily. Such bloodbaths repeat because people stop being outraged. If your humanity is intact and conscience disturbed, please channel that energy some way to disrupt this bipartisan status quo, such as demanding elected officials immediately stop arming and funding the bloodbath they justify against public opinion.

Pete Doktor is a member of Veterans for Peace-Hawaii, the Hawaii Okinawa Alliance and Jewish Voices for Peace-Hawaii.