Nobody knows what to say. And everybody has so much to say. And both responses are not inexplicable. Because it is confounding and heartbreaking, this nightmare — a nightmare that waking up won’t banish — the blood bath in the Middle East. And words are all we have to express what is, in essence, inexpressible.
We are only a scant two weeks away from the fifth anniversary of the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in which the gunman, now convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection, killed 11 people and wounded six. It was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the United States.
The history of coordinated anti-Semitic violence is relentlessly persistent and stunningly brutal. Words fail to capture both its scale and its specificity. Perhaps even worse, the history of such violence is one about which anti-Semitic perpetrators appear to have no knowledge, care or understanding.
Whatever the reason — and there has never, ever been any good reason — the persecution of Jews seems to be a default mode for those driven by hate. To the mind that sees violence as a solution to problems real or merely imagined, hate must have a target. Jews have been, then as now, targets.
And no matter how much ink has been spilled in trying to document and bring awareness to this persistent and virulent plight, there are always new perpetrators willing to advance stereotypes and justify a hatred that finds its fulfillment in killing. This impulse to annihilate a whole people is not the sole purview of Nazi Germany. This impulse respects neither boundary nor nationality. It can — it does — spread like a cancer.
And so to watch the unfolding heinousness of Hamas’ attacks on Israel is beyond heartbreaking. It is hate-making. And to see the desperation on the faces of Palestinians now cut off from food, water, electricity, medical supplies and the means of fleeing to relative safety in the face of a likely coming Israeli ground attack is confounding.
As the narrator in Alain Resnais’ 1956 documentary “Night and Fog” says of human history, “War nods off to sleep, but keeps one eye always open.”
When the waking eye of war is roused, reason vanishes, savagery ensues.
Revenge can seem like just deserts.
But revenge is always savage. History, so convenient to forget, teaches that, too.
To watch footage of the destruction in Gaza and Israel, to hear the stories or simply to hear the wordless anguish of weeping mourners, is to bear distant witness to unimaginable loss.
A wise rabbi colleague posted these words on Facebook: “You can criticize the Israeli government without being anti-Semitic. You can want Palestinian statehood and freedom without being anti-Semitic. You cannot justify or celebrate a brutal murderous terror attack without being anti-Semitic.”
J Street, an organization that promotes pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans in supporting a secure state of Israel as well as a negotiated resolution between Israelis and Palestinians, issued this statement:
“We must recognize that the interests, safety and basic rights of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are intertwined, and struggle for a solution that guarantees true freedom and self-determination for both peoples.”
But the organization’s statement also states the most obvious emotional reaction: “The events of the past two days have made this brighter future feel farther away and more difficult to pursue than any of us could have feared or imagined.”
And so it seems as though all that is left is anguish, anguish for both Israelis and Palestinians. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is intolerable; Amnesty International has labelled it a war crime. The unprovoked Hamas attack on Israel is despicable and untenable. Both breed hatred.
But breeding hatred, instead of struggling for a hard-bought, though contentious, peace, breeds more of the same — with more hatred and more death the predictable result of its sorry coupling.
Jo Page is a writer and Lutheran minister. Reach her at [email protected].
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