Honouring Our Shared Humanity

We must not look away.

Oof! I've just finished reading journalist Marsha Lederman's newest book October 7th: Searching for the Humanitarian Middle. This, hot on the heels of reading Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by (also) journalist Peter Beinart and One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by (you guessed it) journalist Omar El Akkad. All three of these books weave between sharing facts about the region dating from long before the Nakba and their own personal experiences with cultural heartache, especially since October 7th 2023. All three authors speak to the actual humanity of mothers and fathers whose children have been bombed, grandparents starving to death, children orphaned, communities destroyed, trauma that will last for generations. All three authors do an excellent job at reminding us that while Hamas and Netanyahu have opened the gates of hell, the people suffering are beloved individuals whose lives have been destroyed by these psychopaths.

Like anyone and everyone who has a beating heart, mine has been shattered by the ongoing atrocities happening in Palestine since the horrific Hamas attacks on October 7th 2023. I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone of the horrors that Hamas committed on that fateful day, nor do I need to offer up any gruesome details of Israel's relentless retaliation that has not ceased despite the occasional supposed ceasefires.

We are coming up to three years of unspeakable collective heartbreak with no end in sight. We are coming up to three years since the October 7th attacks, yet we were not allowed even two minutes to mourn and grieve and rage about them before Netanyahu set about to destroy all of Gaza and our attention and grief was turned to this tragedy instead. The world should have been allowed to properly mourn the 1,100+ Jewish men, women, and children who were murdered on October 7th, and pray and plead for the hundreds more who were taken hostage. The world should have been allowed the chance to send our love and compassion to the families and friends of the murder and kidnap victims of October 7th. We were denied this time to grieve. Instead we were forced to watch a genocide unleashed.

My thoughts on the State of Israel.

Unlike Marsha and Peter, I have never had any great love for the State of Israel. Yeah, I suppose I joined in with "Next year in Jerusalem" at the end of the occasional Passover Seder, but it never sunk in what that actually meant (now I know). Of course I absolutely understand the desperate need for the safe haven that Jews sought during and after the Holocaust, while countries such as the US and Canada were turning them away even while they were being sent to death camps on European soil. My grandfather was murdered by a Nazi firing squad. My grandmother in a Nazi gas van. Both dumped in mass graves. The need for someplace safe to call home is in my cells. But, no matter how you spin it, I could never understand the 'logic' that made the Jewish diaspora believe that dislocating 750,000 Palestinians and turning them into refugees was going to make their newly founded country safe for anyone. It just doesn't work that way. Violently expanding further and further into places that Palestinians call home, turning the region into an apartheid system is a recipe for unrest, not the peace and safety they claim to desire.

From the Nakba to now, I cannot understand the justification for the constant expansion of Jewish Israel seizing more and more land from Palestinians who have lived there for generations. I was relieved when my daughter, in her second year at university declined an invitation to join her new bestie on a Birthright trip to Israel. I was relieved that my daughter had the critical thinking and moral clarity to choose not to follow her friend on this questionable journey. Stealing land does not make for a clean conscience (or for safe neighbours). I'm happy that my daughter understood this.

Moving beyond the Zionist narrative (or not).

I know and love quite a few folk who love Israel. They are not monsters. They are not uneducated. In my opinion, they are stuck. They were raised with the narrative of Jews returning home to Israel after 2,000 years. They were raised to believe that Jews = goodniks, Arabs = terrorists. They were raised to believe that in order for Jews to be safe (our eternal quest) Israel has a duty and a right to occupy, oppress and obliterate Palestinians. "They're raised to be terrorists." is a common mantra among Jews about a people they've never met.

How do some Jews crawl out of this dark hole of blinkered thinking while so many others remain stuck? I don't know the answer to this, but I think a good starting point is conversation. One Saturday last summer when I was out banging Pots for Peace in Palestine with my fellow Gang of Crones, we were approached by a father and his teenaged son who were visiting from Toronto. They angrily marched up to us ready to accuse us of being Hamas-loving antisemites when they saw my sign: "Another Jewish Voice For Peace" and stopped dead in their tracks. To give them credit, they dropped their anger and asked to engage in conversation. They gave me the predictable "They're all raised to be terrorists." line and I talked to them about how I believe that we all want peace, no more dead babies, and that Netanyahu was a danger to us all. I think we pretty much agreed on the first two, though maybe not on anything else. After about 15 minutes talking and listening to each other (they actually listened to me!), we shook hands, wished each other 'shabbat shalom', and off they went, hopefully feeling less terrified by pro-peace protests. One conversation at a time. Common ground - no more war, no more dead children.

The protests

For reasons only political historians and sociologists might be able to answer, Israel's vice-like grip on Western nations (who are overwhelmingly antisemitic) is deeply perplexing. Likewise, Israel's relentless assaults on Gaza have incurred the public's ire across the globe in a way I can't recall any other war has. I began my life as an activist when I was six years old in the Vietnam Peace marches, but even those protests cannot compare in size to what we've been witnessing over these past nearly three years. Of course, the fact that we're watching the atrocities in real time and the power of social media has a lot to do with the turn out over these past nearly three years, but I think it goes deeper. Mainly, I think we are becoming more aware of the injustices of racism, colonialism, apartheidism (is that a word?), etc. We are seeing the humanity of the people being destroyed by the bombs and other atrocities and we are no longer willing to remain silent. And so we march.

Refuseniks everywhere refuse complicity.

The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts is complicated. As much as I've disagreed with the premise of the State of Israel and I'm horrified by the years of occupation, expansion and violence, I know that there are growing numbers of Israeli Jews who vehemently oppose their nation's mistreatment of Palestinians and are demanding change. There are tens of thousands of Israeli Jews marching for justice and an end to Netanyahu's evil government. Young refuseniks are burning their draft papers. I find solace in the mass call for peace and justice from humanitarian organizations such as @themotherscall, @StandingTogether @JewishVoiceforPeace, and Hand in Hand Centre for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel. All of these groups are grounded in the understanding of our shared humanity and the need for equality and justice. So, yeah - I believe that the State of Israel is itself deeply problematic (as is every colonized nation such as where I live on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen speaking people), but I am heartened to see more and more Israeli Jews and Jews everywhere demanding justice for Palestine.

Learning from books rather than memes

I do worry that far too many people are receiving their education on the situation in Israel-Palestine (and pretty much everything) through shared memes rather than researched books and articles. This is where we're at in society. We see something that pumps our heart rate on social media, assume it's true (or true enough) and we share it without verifying first. And on it goes. Viral. This often leads to mis-, dis-, or half-information. For a deeper dive into the history of the region, or the alliances, and how this war is affecting us all on such a deeply human level, I highly recommend reading all three of these books.

Something's gotta give

I don't know if or how this war will end. War is a disaster. Something's gotta give. Millions of people continue to march and pressure politicians. Some politicians are slowly starting to break away from Israel. A very few politicians such as NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani are not holding back when naming Netanyahu as the war criminal that he is and calling for his arrest.

How do we convince those who still insist that war is the answer, of the humanity they are erasing with each bomb, drone, gun, broken ceasefire, and lying word of hateful rhetoric? How do we connect with those who fall for the lies about people they've never met, and find common ground in wanting peace? How do we dial everything back from constant outrage to a shared love of our shared humanity? I don't know how we will end this war and all wars, but I feel pretty certain that it is art, music, poetry, books, respectful conversation, kindness, food - all expressions of our deepest humanity, of the best of humanity, that is starting to turn the tide where more humans refuse to accept war than those who believe it to be good.

Shalom. Salam. Peace be with us all,

Jessica (she/her)