John,
Two weeks ago, as Shabbat approached one week after Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attacks, I wrote that I could not stop thinking about the Israeli hostages, and about the children of Gaza. Two weeks later, those voices resound louder in our ears.
Since then, I’ve met with family members of the hostages, stood with them at vigils and rallies, read and listened to their anguished words. I’ve cried many times, but there’s no full way of grasping their grief.
Just a month before, I met Shany Granot-Lubaton, an Israeli organizer living in NYC for the year, when she organized protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly; now I encountered her again just as she learned that some of her husband’s cousins were among the hostages. As the father of a 23-year-old Jewish son, Rachel Goldberg’s heartrending words about her 23-year-old son Hersh hit me closest to home.
And I’ve listened to grieving, agonized voices of Palestinians in Gaza, and talked to Palestinian New Yorkers with family members there. I found the audio diary of 19-year-old Tasneem Ismael Ahel, a smart and creative aspiring dental student and artist, now living through her fifth war, especially poignant. And I learned from listening to Isam Hamad, an organizer of the 2018 nonviolent Great Return March in Gaza. Tonight, as we light Shabbat candles, the lights, phone, and internet communications in Gaza have gone out.
Israel has the right and need to defend itself, to hold those who committed the October 7 atrocities accountable, and to keep its citizens safe from future attacks.
But like many others, I do not support the Netanyahu government’s current approach of a bombing campaign in which “the emphasis is on damage and not accuracy” (as IDF spokesman Dan Hagari said last week), a siege that has choked off food and medicine and water, and especially a planned ground invasion, which would kill so many more Palestinians, and so many Israeli soldiers, with no clear plan to achieve long-term safety.
I support calls for a pause in the violence to focus on bringing all the hostages home, to facilitate desperately-needed humanitarian aid in Gaza — and to provide time for considering the wisest path forward.
A humanitarian pause that enables the safe return of hostages and aid to displaced civilians is not the end but a start to achieve long-term safety. I'm not an expert on military strategy or diplomatic negotiations, so I won’t presume to prescribe the steps in between. At a minimum, before more Israeli military action takes place, there need to be much more precise answers to questions about humanitarian aid, respect for international laws, preventing civilian deaths, committing to rebuild and enabling Palestinians in Gaza to return to their neighborhoods there – and for some international supervision of those commitments.
Ultimately of course, safety for both Israelis and Palestinians will require political compromise, in which Palestinians obtain freedom and there is an end to Israeli military occupation, and Israel gains recognition and safety. I understand why it feels nearly impossible to see a path towards that in the context of this moment. But so long as the path to equality and self-determination seems impossible, mutual safety is impossible too. (The fantasy that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have of repressing Palestinians into either permanent submission or displacement is just that).
One more word on the voices I’m listening to: It makes total sense, as Rabbi Rachel Timoner writes, that we have an easier time seeing and hearing and feeling grief for those closer to us. That’s why Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s story resonates so strongly for me, and why I start my account from the grief of Israelis (though surely we must not be surprised that Palestinians and Muslims do the same).
But as she also writes, we can’t stop there. And I fear, in sustained trauma, that we are. As American Jews, I think we have to be honest: many of us (and I’m not exempting myself) aren’t acting as though we genuinely believe that Palestinian lives are fully equal, created in the image of God, equally deserving of human and political rights.
So the voices that have moved me most are those Israelis and Palestinians who have lost loved ones, who have nonetheless, somehow, in ways that surpass comprehension, found ways to insist that they don’t want revenge, don’t want their family members death or kidnapping used to justify more killing.
Like when Rachel Goldberg reminds us that “every single person in Gaza has a mother,” and urges Israel to be careful of “causing harm we can’t undo.” Or when Noy Katsman pleads, “Do not use our death and our pain to bring the death and pain of other people and other families,” and says that even in the face of those who murdered their brother Hayim, “he would still speak out against the killing and violence of innocent people."
Or when Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and Member of Knesset, who has friends who have been injured and killed both in the October 7th attacks and in the bombings of Gaza, declares “There is nothing in this world — not even the cruel occupation — that can justify harming innocent people. Nothing. I have always categorically opposed harming civilians, and I will continue opposing it with every fiber of my being. It is a violation of our collective humanity."
Or watching Israeli Jewish and Palestinians somehow still working together on the ground even in this moment – like the leaders of Standing Together, working to prevent mixed cities from erupting in violence; or the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, bringing lawsuits to make sure water is provided in Gaza; or B’tselem, working to prevent settler violence in the West Bank.
Many of these activists have been threatened, some have been arrested. But they are still showing us, in Odeh’s words, what it means to choose life over revenge.
Praying, with their voices in my ears, for a Shabbat Shalom.
Brad
