Decency

After yesterday’s delicious propofol nap (colonoscopy: one polyp, sent for testing, not worried) I waded back into the social media waters to express my sadness about posters of Israeli victims from the Hamas massacre being ripped down. It seemed to me that tearing down images of kidnapped civilians is cruel, and I compared it to the posters that sprouted up in the days following 9/11. What would the reaction have been like if groups of people had wandered the city tearing down the posters of the lost and missing following that attack? It seemed like a reasonable analogy to me, but I was quickly disabused of the notion.

I was told that the posters are propaganda being used to manufacture consent for genocide. I was told Israel is an oppressive colonizing force. I was told the posters are meaningless because there is no point in putting a missing poster in a country thousands of miles away from where they were kidnapped. I was told that I shouldn’t be mad about anything other than hospitals and refugee camps being bombed. I was, in essence, told that the people on those posters don’t matter.

I think they matter. I think 1,400 massacred civilians matter. I think the hundreds kidnapped matter, too. I think displaying their images is a fine thing to do because it’s important to put faces to the numbers

.Are the posters an organic expression of mourning or are they a coordinated effort by the Israeli government to call attention to the victims? I don’t care which they turn out to be. There are real people depicted on them who have suffered real abuses at the hands of people who want them dead for crimes they did not commit, just as the people on the 9/11 posters were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with them. That’s what terrorism is, the indiscriminate killing of others to achieve a political end. Those saying that Israelis got what was coming for them because of their “support” for Israel is no different than saying the victims of 9/11 got what they deserved for their “support” of the US.

To be clear, Israel is also committing terrorism in its response to the Hamas massacre. Thousands of Palestinians are dead now in Gaza because of Israel’s barbaric actions. Netanyahu and his far-right government seem hellbent on leveling Gaza to dust in retribution. In a very real way, what they are doing is worse than terrorism because they seem to have no political end in mind. They cannot believe their response will bring peace. They cannot believe it will do anything other than ensure that the conflict continues into the distant future; perhaps that is their political end. Perhaps they believe that a forever war is preferable to peace.

The terrible truth about terrorism is that it often works. Blowing shit up gets people’s attention. Terrorism has the effect of reshuffling the deck. We believe ourselves to be living one life, then a bomb goes off and our world is upended. The first question is always, “Who did this?” but the second question is more important. “Why did they do this?”

Terrorism forces its victims to ask both questions. When we know the answer to the second, we are then forced to account for their stated purpose. Why Hamas did this is well-known. They wish to rid the world of Israel and establish a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” itself a propagandistic, antisemitic motto. They want to kill Israel and they want to kill Jews, although I’m not sure if I have the ordering correct.Many people look at the difficult and sometimes deplorable conditions Palestinians are forced to live under and conclude that Hamas has a point. Maybe Israel should be destroyed, and maybe the nation’s Jews should be destroyed along with it. In other words, maybe the massacre was justified. If so, what difference do a few posters make? None at all.

I’m not here to argue for Israel or against Israel, for Hamas or against. I’m here to argue for decency. Why is it so hard for people to condemn Hamas and the Israeli response to Hamas? Can’t we hold two truths in our heads at the same time? Israelis deserve to live free and secure lives. Palestinians also deserve to live free and secure lives. Both deserve a nation. Both deserve peace. Neither deserves the atrocities visited upon them. Why is it so hard to stand up for humanity instead of for a religion or a political movement or a terrorist organization or a nation? Why is the first response to crisis always to resort to rage instead of compassion?  

So that’s why I went on social media, to attempt to model the kind of behavior I wish I was seeing from leaders and those they serve. It didn’t go well, of course, because nothing on social media goes well. One unintended consequence, though, was a number of personal messages I received from friends, Jews and gentiles, reaching out with their own fears, their own rage. Some of my Jewish friends feel betrayed, but most just feel sad. Sad that, once again, people seem do dismissive of Jewish life. I imagine there must be so many Arabs and Muslims who feel the same way. In this country, both groups are tiny minorities. Both groups have seen a spike in attacks against them.

Maybe when they were doing my colonoscopy, I should have asked them to untangle the knot I’ve been feeling in my stomach since October 7^th. That knot is the deep anxiety Jews have always known in difficult times, but it’s also a fear that has no religious affiliation. It’s the fear for a world that seemingly slipped into madness around 2016 and has yet to find its way back. I know many of you feel the same way, and I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can to say to alleviate any of it, but I can be decent. Which is all I’m trying to do right now. Because decency may not solve any of these problems but it can touch the people in your life, and maybe it can inspire them to be decent as well. So many of us are feeling vulnerable and raw. It’s natural that those emotions might spill over into unproductive ways, like ripping down posters of kidnapped Israelis. My inclination is not to condemn those people, but to recognize that they are suffering, too. I don’t have a solution and I’m not even trying to find a solution. The only thing I know how to do, and the thing that helps me sleep at night, is to seek compassion.