A Harvest of Sorrow
Of what comfort will my writing this be to those who are being bombed in Gaza, or those whose loved ones lay bleeding in the aftermath of a concert? None. So what, then, is the point of my writing this?
I’ve seen a rapid coalescing of my friends and associates—of intelligent and honorable people—into two distinct and separate camps: those who demand blood for the spilled blood of the thousand-plus Israelis who have been killed in an almost unprecedented terrorist act, and those who justify said attacks, suggesting in someway that the Israelis at the concert are an acceptable sacrifice for…what was that phrase…reshuffling the deck?
Neither of these stances are correct. As usual, we have lost the nuance of the situation, and this lack of understanding will lead to the deaths of hundreds if not thousands more. I would argue that it already is.
The people at that concert are not Netanyahu, nor are they in his cabinet or among his allies in the Israeli Parliament. They weren’t at the concert to make a political statement at all, most likely. These were innocents, slaughtered. Such acts of violence as the indiscrimant killing by Hamas is never okay. It wasn’t okay when extremists attack our night clubs, our schools, our power stations, and our World Trade Center and Pentagon, and it’s not okay now.
But we must also consider that the people of the Gaza Strip are no more Hamas than the people in Mexico are members of the Sinaloa Cartel, or the people of New York members of the Genovese crime family. That is to say, those who retaliatory bombs have recently rained down upon, and who have been forced from their homes and deeper into destitution, are very unlikely to be active members of Hamas. Some may support Hamas in principle as some concert-goers doubtless support Netanyahu and the extremists he has installed at the helm of the Israeli government.
A brief departure, but I will return to these points. I must first say that violence in all its forms should be evicted from our collective arsenals and universally condemned. I would further suggest that we continually fail to recognize violence in all of its forms.
It’s simple to interpret the act of a single volatile, explosive extremist attack as the violence that it is. But how easily do we notice the equally violent act of the person with power slowly starving an innocent to death, stealing from them their means to exist? How many of us recognize the violence of the lay-offs of hundreds of thousands of workers when a single CEO missteps and betrays the public trust, people with families many of which never recover? Are we even cognizant of the violence of poisoning our world by intentional denial of climate change until it’s well past the point of ever returning to anything we recognize as normal? These are all violent acts, hidden in the shroud of contracts and supposed freedoms.
We often fail to see slow-moving atrocities for the violence they are. In Gaza, the situation is exactly one of these glacial events, moving inch by unstoppable inch toward the destruction of the Palestinian people. Comfortably free of the pressure-cooker that is the Gaza region, we have all debated the future of this area. While we talked, people died. Our governments made and broke alliances, and negotiated with the lives of over two-million humans as bargaining chips. While we bartered, people died. And what solution have we found?
We have stood by and watched Israel take and take and take land from the Palestinian people, kill their children both directly and indirectly by starvation, and have allowed ourselves to be comforted by the mere idea of the possibility of a solution. While we dreamed, people died. I am not justifying. I am only explaining that the fault of the current situation lies not only among those who perpetuate these acts, but also those of us who stand by and have done nothing. How many deaths would you witness before you take up arms? How many nights without food will you suffer before you fight back?
“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” - Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906
All of this, and we have the audacity to be surprised when violence erupts. I deny us the ignorance we so graciously give to ourselves, because I must deny it. To suggest that anything but violence should come from the violence to which we have allowed ourselves to acquiesce is a stunning act of rationalization that we should all immediately shun.
None of what I’ve said makes the Hamas attacks right, by any sense of the imagination. Attacks like this are impossible to defend for this most fundamental reason: it is impossible to tell in mass acts of violence who the enemies truly are. Even though some of those concert-goers held those extremist right-wing beliefs predicated on hastening the destruction of Palestine, how is it possible to tell them apart from the non-believers from a parachute in the sky or an explosive hurled into a crowd? I’d suggest that even among my close friends, there are those who harbor extremist views of which I’m currently unaware. Hamas has undeniably killed those who would have been their allies, as well as those who have already been their enemies. Worse, it has hardened many of the loved ones of those who would have been their allies against their worthy cause of self-determination. They have sullied this cause.
We already see Israel solidifying in this conflict, coming together under the battleflag. I’ve even seen in my social media feeds those who stand with Israel unconditionally. It’s heartbreaking to see reductionism being so effective against such normally caring people.
Despite the “successful” attack, we all know who has the power in the region, and it isn’t Hamas, nor is it the Palestinian people (note the distinction there). Destroying the infrastructure, then, only serves to accelerate the sluggish brutality already in taking place against millions of innocents. Just as Hamas has doubtless turned allies into enemies in their attack, Israel does the same in their wonton destruction and forced evacutation demands.
The cry for blood cannot be sated with more violence. It only grows.
There can be no winner here. Resist the urge to pick up the flag and rally around one group or the other. This sadness is one of the many rewards for our collective carelessness in the treatment of millions of lives. We have all helped to plant the seeds of hopelessness and despair, and we have watered them with endless inaction and platitudes. Finally, we reap our harvest of sorrows.
Resist the shock, resist the outrage, resist the jingoistic cries of solidarity. What we must do now is steady ourselves, and stand with the innocents. The choices we make now are of the utmost importance. We as the people of the United States have one simple job to do: resist the reductionist outrage. We cannot allow this single event to harden us to the suffering of humans, wherever those humans happen to live. We must keep the conflict in our minds as messy and complicated as it truly is, however much it hurts to do so, and slowly, carefully we as a nation must help to pick up the pieces.
My heart for the people Israel. My heart for the people of Palestine. My heart for the innocents.
Update: Since writing this article, UN has updated their numbers of Palestinians killed or injured. For more accurate numbers, please review the UN’s numbers.
