Tag: weltzschmerz

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What happens if I change this

Small actions to counter the rage

Things are getting so much worse in northern Gaza. It feels disgusting to scroll past social media posts about active suffering there interspersed with tips for Halloween crafts.

I can’t take the cognitive dissonance anymore. So I’ve decided I’m going to write an email every day to my MP, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister and the Prime Minister as one way to channel my rage and anguish. Here’s a bit of what I sent them today:

As you know, in the past three weeks, Israel has stepped up its wanton violence against civilians in the region. 640 Palestinians have been killed in northern Gaza in the past 17 days, 33 of them in the past day. With the assault on the Jabalia refugee camp, it very much appears as though Israel is attempting to empty northern Gaza of any Palestinians. 

Every day, I ask myself: how is this war making Israel any safer?

Canada has always prided itself on its role as a global peacemaker. As Bob Rae himself has said, the political aspirations of the Palestinians will only ever be solved through diplomatic means, not military ones. Where is Canada now, in a region that disparately needs peace?

I also:

  • signed this petition
  • signed up to receive news from Jewish Voice for Peace and Independent Jewish Voices Canada. I am so aware of the ongoing need to counter rising anti-Semitism; plus I want to stay tuned in not just to Palestinian voices, but progressive, anti-Zionist voices of Jewish folks, too. (The Israeli media I follow doesn’t always make room for that, with the mighty exception of Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy.)*
  • used the money from the cancellation of mini getaway to make a donation to World Central Kitchen

I just need to take one small action every day to stave off absolutely going mad at the horrors of the world.

*If you have a Toronto Public Library card, you can read Haaretz and other newspapers from the Middle East for free using the PressReader service.

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What happens if I change this

What it takes to lose your own humanity

There are almost no words to describe the horror of Israel’s bombing of a tent area for displaced persons at Al Aqsa Hospital in the north of Gaza a couple of days ago. Even the US State Department described the incident as “horrific.”

I do not know how the population of Gaza will psychologically handle the aftermath of this last year+ of war. With so many people being killed, injured and disappeared, undoubtedly the repercussions will last decades. It’s much the same, I imagine, as with histories of Jewish trauma, which research shows has moved through generations epigenetically.

Sometimes when I see or read the responses of Israelis to the ongoing violence happening to Gazans, I try to put myself in their shoes. Generally, their first reply to the horrors their country has committed is to say something along the lines of, “Do you know what Hamas did on October 7th?”

For some folks, I believe this is the trauma talking. Sometimes when I am able to pause and just sit with that question for a moment, I can tune in to that person’s rage or grief or sense of righteousness. It is and was quite genuinely an assault on the national psyche of Israel, and for many Jewish people around the world. I try to grasp the feeling of this was never supposed to happen here. This was never supposed to happen again. I have compassion for the individual people still reverberating from that trauma.

The Israelis and Jews around the globe who have responded to the ceaseless violence in Gaza (and the West Bank and Lebanon) by saying never again applies to those places, too give me hope. Their compassion, vulnerability, and humanity is one tiny beacon of beautiful light in a despairing darkness.

But more often than not, the “what about October 7th?!” response to the horrors in Gaza comes embedded in an sense of revenge detached from basic humanity. It is not just a thirst for revenge. It is an entitlement to harm. I find this incredibly disturbing.

The glee at attacking innocents is revolting. It’s scary to see and hear IDF soliders and Israeli citizens using, framing all Gazans as animals, or all Palestinians as terrorists. The blindness to history repeating itself is baffling.

I really wonder how much you have to detach your own self from your own humanity in order to detach others from their humanity.

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What happens if I change this

It gets worse before it gets better

So Israel is now attacking LITERAL UN PEACEKEEPERS who have been stationed for FIFTY YEARS in the area between Lebanon and Israel.

With each fresh attack on civilians in Gaza, I have wondered, “will this one be the tipping point?” When slews of innocent lives have been lost, or hospitals have been attacked, or actual refugee camps have been torched, I have wondered if things have gotten bad enough that the international community will now come to its senses. Obviously, we are not there yet.

But with Israel undermining the UN, injuring peacekeepers and verbally attacking the UN Secretary General personally, I do wonder if Netanyahu is hoisting himself on his own petard.

UN member states now HAVE to sit up and pay attention to the war crimes Israel is committing because it is contravening decades-old global agreements that are harming non-Palestinians.

We’ve been completely fine for Palestinians simply searching for food to be killed. But the international community won’t be fine with Israeli aggression on, again, PEOPLE LITERALLY STATIONED IN AN AREA TO MAINTAIN PEACE.

My only hope is that by drawing other nations into Israeli’s use of force, the international community will begin to appropriately respond. We need an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, a withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon, and proper peace process to be put in place. From what I understand by various statements this year from the King of Jordan, Israel’s neighbours are prepared to discuss a framework for peace talks. But who in Israel’s current government is at all interested in peace?

As Diana Buttu wrote recently, “Israeli policies are premised on the idea that what cannot be achieved through force can only be achieved through more force.”

I know it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But how many more children have to die before the situation is deemed bad enough to do something about it?

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What happens if I change this

A few inadequate words about Gaza

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.

________

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.

_______

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.

________

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.

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What happens if I change this

october 7th

I’ve been trying all day, on and off, to write a post about Gaza and Israel. This is a piece I’ve been trying to write all year. I keep stopping myself from posting anything because I want it to be as precise as possible. But I also want it to be perfect, water tight, irrefutable, and that’s just never going to happen. I will keep chipping away at my wide ranging piece, which offers nothing new, but is an important encapsulation of my thoughts. It’s through the writing itself that my position becomes clear to me.

I will also add that I have started to add bedtime prayers to my evening routine for the very first time in my life. I don’t know if that would have come about at this time if I didn’t feel prompted by this horrible conflict. It’s hard to read news reports and see videos every day and not have it touch my spirit, day after day after day.

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What happens if I change this

I’m Happy and I’m also so goddamn sad for the world

It’s a constellation of variables that have brought me to existing in fall 2024 as a person who feels pretty contented most of the time. It’s the anti-depressant, the bike riding and swimming, the good health of my little family, the financial security, and the flowering of possibilities here in my second adolescence, my midlife.

It’s the feeling of admitting to myself and the world who I am. It’s the jettisoning of outdated ideas from my life. (Whose idea was it to try to become the Executive Director of such and such or the Policy Director of Blah Blah, anyway?) I know what I’m good at and what I like to do. I know now I’ll never be Oprah, and I also know that in order to have a positive impact on people, I don’t have to be Oprah.

And still, all around, on a daily basis, there is the stomach churning acknowledgement of the cruelties and devastation of the outside world. In Toronto, homelessness is always right there, especially since the height of the pandemic. Every morning, I make a point of reading the news of what’s happening in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank, and Lebanon. (I will write about this soon.) Almost every day, the climate emergency makes itself obvious to us.

I know my happiness in this phase of my life is also about the complete accident of having been born white and middle-class in Canada. The foundation of my financial security is my marriage. My health and non-disabled status can be taken away from me in an instant.

There is so much goodness to be grateful for and so much badness that needs to be addressed. I’ve started praying at bedtime in the past few weeks, as an acknowledgement of both.

I am happy and I am also still so goddamn sad for the world.