Like everybody else I come in contact with, I am saddened and depressed by the images of the attacks on Israel by Hamas this week. I have resisted the urge to comment on the war for all the usual reasons. First, I have nothing original to add to the dark picture. Secondly, I know from bitter experience that all but a tiny handful of people who try to offer helpful suggestions about the Middle East end up looking foolish. There is such a complex history, so many choices of starting places, that you don't have to go very far to find somebody insisting you are starting with the wrong one.
My earliest childhood lesson in how messed up the world can get comes from growing up with German people during and just after World War II. "Germans" were "bad" people, according to most of the adult world I lived in in America. But they weren't. My grandmother was love personified. So were all her friends from the Germania Singing Society, from the German Lutheran Church, from the German-American community of which she was a part. "There are good people and bad people everywhere," was her explanation. It should have satisfied my six-year-old self, but it didn't. When I read the newspaper, the references were always to the misery "the Germans" caused. Nobody used the expression "the bad Germans." It was simply "the Germans."
This human habit of generalizing is a necessary but ultimately harmful social convention. Today "the Russians" are invading Ukraine and "the Israelis" are about to bomb, starve and crush Gaza in retaliation for the barbarism inflicted on them by Hamas. And just as I knew there was something wrong about faulting "the Germans" for what the Nazis did, I know there is something wrong with not seeing that countless thousands of young Russian boys are being led to the slaughter by the Russian military, no less victims of Putin's imperial ambitions than Ukrainians. And Palestinians living in Gaza, who have not had a say in who controls their lives since Hamas was elected in 2006, are about to die in even greater numbers now than even before. Hamas savages, Gazans die, along with Israelis.
What makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so bitter is the widespread conviction that the two sides lack the will, and many believe the capacity to come together. On the Palestinian side is Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to killing every last Jew with a ferocious hatred not seen since the Holocaust. On the Israeli side are the Orthodox ultra-nationalists, who continue - with the aid of that god damned son of a bitch Benjamin Nethanyahu and his sinister Deputy Prime Minister, Yariv Levin - to squeeze the life out of both Palestinians and democracy in Israel. People for whom the current apartheid policy is only a stepping stone to the total disenfranchisement of non-Jews within Israel.
I've been sitting here, trying to tell myself to take that "god damned son of a bitch" bit I just wrote out, and go back to my comfortable claim to neutrality. I'd like to do that. Would like to sing out, "I'm neither Arab nor Jew and just want everybody to get along."
But I can't do that at the moment. At the moment, all the other bits of history need to get pushed aside in my head as I try to get it around the fact that Hamas attacked a group of people singing and dancing. Killed a couple hundred of them. Then raped and dragged a hundred more into Gaza to be used as shields as they continued their efforts to wipe out every Jewish man, woman and child.
three friends who wrote me "but what about the Palestinians?" when I posted that beautiful picture of the Israeli flag superimposed on the Brandenburg Gate.
My response is "First things first." First recognize this is not a fair fight. The framing, at least at the moment, is not Palestinian vs. Israeli; it's between barbarians and families murdered in their beds. Between barbarians and singers and dancers.
As an American, I support President Biden's declaration: "Let there be no doubt: The United States has Israel's back."
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