The whole world screams and falls apart
Over the last few days, I have posted a few things and spent many hours thinking about what I perceived to be people on the left celebrating the deaths of Israeli civilians in the wake of the unprecedented Hamas attacks last weekend.
I know that ultimately nothing I (or really any of us) have to say about this matters much at all, but I think of myself as someone who values compassion and humanity. This is important to me, especially as an American Jew whose safety is used as the justification behind atrocities in the continued occupation and now potentially genocide of Gaza and Palestine.
I’ve had some time to sit with the feelings I’ve been having. These are the feelings I have noticed: fear, grief, confusion. Fear that I will be seen as pro-Israel by my friends on the left for not saying the right things. Fear that the left will turn against all Jews due to this conflict and my friends and I will become targets. Fear and grief for the friends of mine who have family in Israel. Grief over the thought of losing a loved one in such a horrific way and living under the threat of war (whether as a Palestinian or an Israeli). Fear of what horrors await as this war and the seemingly inevitable genocide progresses.
When the Paris attacks happened in 2015, I remember sitting glued to the TV at my dad’s apartment. I felt so afraid. Those people were just like me. They were out seeing a band in a small venue, one of my favorite activities. And then they were hiding under jackets as their friends bled out on the ground next to them.
In the days after that attack, the discourse turned to other atrocities around the world. Why did we not light up monuments around the world when hundreds are killed in terrorist attacks or earthquakes somewhere in the global South? We were told by some we were wrong to feel more grief over this than that.
As my husband put it in a piece for Flavorwire about the attacks at the time:
“The logical extreme of this line of thinking is that I should feel the same grief for the death of an unknown person in a faraway country as I would for my own mother. In purely objective terms, again, this is true — all human lives are of equal value. But if we did process grief that way, we’d either all go crazy or we’d all cease to care about any death much at all.”
Our feelings are not barometers of truth or justice. It is well known that we are biased psychologically when it comes to race. Not long after birth, babies react more positively towards faces that are the same race as them. We instinctively relate more to those who we see as part of our group.
This in-group bias certainly plays into how we feel about these violent events. When I saw people posting celebratory memes of people dancing at a music festival in Israel moments before they were attacked, I could not help but think of being at a music festival myself a few weeks ago, and imagine us being attacked. It was terrifying.
This impulse—to connect with those like us—is meant to protect our communities, but as we see in Israel, it can be hugely destructive. Jews experienced one of the greatest horrors of the 20th century, and for the past 50 years have inflicted pain on another, totally innocent people in response. And ultimately, it has made our whole world worse, more horrifying, less safe. This conflict, this occupation, is an almost cosmic demonstration of the cycle of abuse. And it shows no sign of stopping.
I think about the firebombing of Dresden, the countless people who were killed horrifically in the name of stamping out the Nazis. Many of the people killed were probably perfectly fine with the idea of my people being exterminated. But that does nothing to make me feel good about those atrocities, the same way that the brutality of the Japanese empire does not justify the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I’m writing this from 30,000 feet over the ocean, flying to a country that has another brutal and violent past that is usually conveniently forgotten. Tomorrow, people there will take a vote and very likely deny the country’s first peoples a merely symbolic opportunity to express some agency over what happens to them.
There is no end to this. I don’t know what we are supposed to do.