The biggest barrier I have had to writing out my feelings about the atrocities happening in Gaza is that I don’t want the Jewish people who I know personally to feel like I don’t also appreciate what they individually face in their lives as Jews.
But I think I need to start assuming that any Jewish friend, colleague, neighbour or acquaintance who knows me should also know that I have room in my brain for nuance.
More than that, I hope that anyone who knows me knows that I’m pretty good at holding space for understanding personal experiences that individual people go through, and understanding those experiences as occurring within systems of power.
In her excellent book Döppleganger, Naomi Klein quotes john a. powell, the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley:
“We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people.”
For Klein,
“That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structure.”
In the year since the Hamas attack on Israel, I have tried my best to toggle back and forth between understanding the view of individual people—flawed, ignorant, just-trying-their-best people—and hard on oppressive structures.
So for example, I have no doubt that it must be personally, individually quite terrifying to be Jewish and to be aware that anti-Semitism is up in Canada, for example (as is Islamophobia). I just read a headline tonight about a Jewish school where shots were fired, for the second time in the past year. I read an Instagram post a few days ago from a Jewish mom who had decided to keep her kids out of school on October 7th. These sound like individually scary experiences that I have compassion for.
Similarly, I have compassion for individual Jews and Israelis who felt deeply violated by the Hamas attacks. An atrocity like this, the biggest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, was never supposed to happen in Israel. I can imagine the sense of pure violation one would feel as an Israeli, and even as a Jewish person living outside Israel, too. On a personal, human, individual level, it is a true horror.
And then there are the hostages. Can you imagine? The terror of being kidnapped, or the horror of having a loved one being taken from you—it’s absolutely stomach-churning. The idea of being targeted, kidnapped, or killed simply for being who you are–it’s not supposed to happen in our modern world. I think of the families attending protests every week to bring them home. Israel was supposed to be your safe space. That was the dream.
I have tremendous compassion for individual Jews who have felt lonely or isolated or shat on over the past year. I have been repulsed by people online being dismissive and cruel towards those who have expressed sadness, shock and fear over what happened on October 7. But we achieve literally nothing by trolling humans expressing sorrow over a mass atrocity.
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Then I toggle to the system level.
That is the level where 42,000 Palestinians have died, about 70% of them being women and children. Something like 10,000 more are unaccounted for, and 100,000 are injured. Save the Children reports over 20,000 children are lost, disappeared, detained, buried under the rubble or in mass graves.
These are mass killings that have unfolded on our screens in real time, live streamed by the victims—and yet, we are still having debates about the correct semantic label to apply to the indiscriminate mass killing of civilians, and the wonton destruction of their territory.
Toggling back to the personal level, there are individual, personal stories of Palestinians who come across my screen every day. There is the father who got his twins birth certificates and death certificates on the same day. The child whose hair fell out from the shock and stress of living in a war. The mother who bathes her child with sand. And this summer, there was the father holding his headless baby, decapitated in a strike on Al-Shifa hospital I believe (I have seen a drawing of the image, and read descriptions of it, but I’m not linking to the photo/video because I don’t want to see it, but it’s definitely Google-able).
At the systems level, all I can keep thinking over and over and over and over is: how is all this killing and all this destruction making Israel any safer? It’s not. Genocide, I heard someone say recently, is suicide, and I believe it.
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The bottom line, to me, is that the political aspirations of the Palestinian people can only be addressed through diplomacy—adults using their big brains and coming to a political solution. A military solution, as much as Benjamin Netanyahu wants to remain committed to it, will never result in a safer, more secure Israel. It will never address the core grievance the Palestinians have, of the moment when the international community let them down, and allowed the Nakba to occur.
When I try to toggle to the personal, lived experience of IDF soliders proudly posting videos of themselves mocking Palestinian men who are tied up and lying prone on the ground, that’s when my thought experiment starts to fizzle and sputter. When I see videos of Israeli settlers illegally creating settlements in the West Bank, or taking boat tours at night to watch the destruction in Gaza like a fireworks show, my sense of empathy runs out.
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In the weeks following Hamas’ attack on Israeli citizens happened, I struggled to understand. One young pro-Palestianian Jewish TikTokker recommended several books. I picked two of them up: Mark Tessler’s A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and The Arab-Israeli Reader, by Walter Laquer and Dan Schueftan. Getting grounded in the facts of the history by widely recognized, generally non-controversial sources was crucial to my understanding.
I do think it is critically important right now as individual people in the West to keep an eye out for any hatred that has the opportunity to germinate in our minds. I think we do know from history that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia can root surprisingly easily within us. Anyone who cares about what’s happening in the region is morally required, IMHO, to stay vigilant against stereotypes and hatred that can bloom in our noggins.
To help me do this, I’ve been doing a few different things:
- periodically reading Israeli newspapers (free through the Toronto Public Library)
- following Al-Jazeera and other Palestinian journalists on TikTok
- watching The Zone of Interest and WWII and Hitler documentary series on Netflix
- watching Al-Jazeera’s new documentary about Israeli war crimes
- reading news from the region every morning on the CBC news app (I don’t feel like I can start my day until I find out what happened in Lebanon, Gaza, Iran or Israel overnight).
- I look out for Palestinian voices, like Bisan, of course, and Motaz, and Medo (who died recently in a bombing) and Hamada, who makes the kids in his area so happy.
- I look out for the voices of anti-Zionist Jews, like Naomi Klein, Norman Finkelstein, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, and social media dude Jacob Berger.
I feel like I have so much more to say, and yet, of course, absolutely nothing of what I have to say is new or different.
All I know is that so many nights I have gone to bed over the past year thinking about all the displaced persons in Gaza sleeping in tents instead of a comfortable bed, and I have woken up every morning for the past year to check the CBC News app to find out what happened in Gaza overnight.
I need to start phoning my political representatives on a weekly basis as a way to move some of this energy out of me. Writing an occasional letter or going to an occasional protest or sending money on an inconsistent basis doesn’t feel like enough. I need more consistent, systems-level actions.