The boy and I were watching ABC Nightly News tonight while eating bratwurst and a nice salad with pears and raw onion. The salad was excellent: both of us were surprised. And the brats, boiled in bear and served on brioche buns, were delightful, and as I write this, I’m realising that the bountiful alliteration didn’t hurt.
This isn’t about that, though, because the news tonight was all about the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. The other day the coverage focused on the rocket attacks and the endlessly described “eerie silences” on the streets of Tel Aviv, but tonight was a lot worse, discussing personal stories of people watching their families get shot in front of them while their wives or kids or grandmothers were hauled off to go who knows where and serve likely as human shields, potentially worse. The boy and I talked about it, and I told him in no world is there an excuse for that sort of evil. He’s now eleven, in sixth grade, starting to study things like the Civil War and the like with more than just a patriotic “this is our country’s history” take on things, so I don’t want to sugar coat this particular historical moment.
In my heart of hearts, though, I was struggling a bit. There is no part of my psyche that can manufacture the kind of inhumanity that would allow me to sympathise with the Hamas gunmen over the past few days, but what was somehow easy to bring to mind was a sense of mindless, numbing, and inescapable despair that must go along with being a middle aged dad in the Gaza Strip. Unable to leave, unable to find a job, watching your kids grow up trapped in what is in effect a permanent and inescapable refugee camp, I could easily bring to mind an existential sense of non-being. I couldn’t transfer that to a sense that it would be okay to kill another human being because of it, or take away the child or spouse or loved one of the people who are running the camp to certain death; no, because that would actually separate me from being able to feel despair. The art of being human is, on a certain very basic level, choosing not to commit the willful atrocity in the face of personal hopelessness. Being human is to choose despair over dehumanising another: it is, to use Buber’s language, to always refuse to de-Thou the other.
It got me thinking of Mersault in The Stranger, whose creator would, I think, agree with me but he would make his creation do quite the opposite, in the nihilistic pursuit of being not human; or the coward in The Red Badge of Courage, acting as a human in his flight and ironically returning to his tribe gun in hand – renouncing his sinless cowardice in favour of murderous manufactured bravery.
It also had me thinking of the fact that, for the past few decades, Americans have been bombing, rocketing, and droning to death countless thousands of Arabs across the Middle East. That’s awful, of course, but it’s still no excuse – no reason – to kidnap an Israeli grandmother, rape her for the YouTube value, and then kill her, as one anecdote related on the ABC Nightly News last night. The terrorists even chose their film angles to maximise the intellectual horror: there is only one way to interpret watching young happy men with guns round up Jewish women, hitting them as the go, and loading them onto transports. My guess is the young men with the guns, abusing the prisoners for the cameras, were too stupid to understand the propaganda weapons they were being made to be, but the unseen men behind the smartphones photographing them knew exactly what they were doing, and the fact they never show their faces for all of that makes it even more abhorrent.
And yet: not so abhorrent that I could imagine ever participating in any of it. I can vaguely imagine what it might have been at age 20 to get drafted and serve in the military, and I have enough friends who have served to know that a part of the induction experience is to tone down one’s humanity enough to allow that killing spark of inhumanity to emerge. In battle, it can be the difference between living and dying – to say nothing of victory or defeat.
I wasn’t enjoying myself thinking any of this; it seemed to lead nowhere, or rather, it leads only to a recognition that, even if I can’t imagine it, a substantial portion of the world not only can imagine it but lives it, they choose it. Earlier in the day I had watched the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom on Bloomberg TV effectively lose her shit: “never has the Holy Land seen atrocities such as this, never”, she said, ignoring the Israeli massacres during the pre-1947 civil war, ignoring the Crusaders and Saladin, ignoring Masaba, ignoring half the Old Testament. Even as I thought that, though, I thought “well, she’s upset, and this is part of the process by which you recover your humanity.” And then the Israeli defense minister popped up and told a press conference that Palestinians – not Hamas, mind you, but Palestinians – had to be fought without mercy because they were “animalistic”. Oh Buber, where are Thou?
My son interrupted my bleak reverie. “I think the Palestinians have just given up, I mean really just given up. They are probably mostly all going to be killed by the Israelis, Dad, but they don’t seem to care anymore.”
He talked about how someone at camp told him that rats, if you corner them, will attack you, even though they know you’ll kill them, because it doesn’t matter any more. They watched a lot of Ratatouille at camp on the weekends, so I think that’s what he was talking about – I remembered the scene.
I told him people aren’t rats, except when others treat them that way. And even then, I told him, we still get to choose whether or not we want to kill on our way out, like rats, or if we want to forgive, like human beings.
He thought for a moment and said he understood. I told him I hoped he’d never face that choice, but if he did, that he’d forgive in his last moments of life, instead of trying to keep justifying the other person’s desire to kill. He said he wasn’t sure what he’d do, but he understood what I was saying.
There is, of course, a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, just as there is a solution to racism in the US, and to tribalism in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The answer is for one side to simply stop viewing the moment of their torment as a reason to torment further, even if it means their own death. And if one side does that simultaneously, indeed, it will simply be wiped out – the mechanisms of hatred being so ingrained that they’ll be unable to stop themselves. It won’t even be a sin: it will be a heroic, saintly act on the part of the side that chooses to martyr themselves, and the follow through of the other side to wipe them out will just, simply, be a Pavlovian response. Pure animalism kills pure rationalism dead – it is what it is.
What’s worked in the past is the symbolic refusal that comes up against a random forgetfulness or arrogance or whatever to act in response. P.W. Botha choosing to let Mandela live – and write, and be his best human self – in prison instead of just killing him like Biko, for example – wrong move for the white nationalists, right move for humanity. Had all of South Africa’s black Africans simply laid themselves down, it would have been a simple bloodbath, and every single one of them doing the same caused a private death. But one guy taking a step back, and facing one evil guy who forgot to be evil that day, and you have the potential for something to spark, something good.
Oddly, though, that requires continuing to care. My son’s right, today: it feels like the men and women and children of Gaza have given up. Some are now wandering aimlessly in their tiny strip of land, trying to avoid getting hit by Israeli shells or found by the inevitable wave of invading soldiers to come sometime soon. Some are arming themselves up with what, in the movies, would be a comic sense of purpose, even though we can guess what the outcome will be. Thousands of Israeli soldiers are girding for a battle with a predetermined narrative arc, getting ready for what will surely be decades of future moralistic PTSD to haunt their dreams.
In and amongst them are plenty of people like me, I think – those who may be called upon to shoot, or called upon to rear up after being cornered, and who are unable to imagine themselves doing anything other than reflect. They’re terrified, I think, but I also think they’re more ready for what will come in the next few hours and days than the barbarians on either side of the barricades. They haven’t given up, the way my son put it, and they haven’t stopped imagining the other side as human. In a place like Israel and Gaza, maybe the numbers of those in the middle, those who can still distinguish themselves by their inabiilty to hate, are approaching limit zero. And if that is the case, then it will not have mattered who started the violence this last time – whether it was the accumulated horror of living in an occupied land, or the immediate horror of living through a pogrom conducted by an amatuerish horde of monsters. Blaming those who respond to the last spark is a pointless exercise.
Far better, though, this evening most of all, to be focused on those in the middle, however few, the ones who haven’t given up, who still radiate warmth towards their fellow man, regardless of past transgressions, and who see themselves in the sins of others. May the bullets not find them, and let them be the ones who emerge tomorrow – and may they face off against others who feel the same. The ones who rape, who kill, who order the shellings, who enjoy targeting the missiles; who perpetuate the hatreds on both sides – I cannot imagine killing them, I cannot imagine doing evil to them. But I can wish them to go away.
After the ABC Nightly News, we watched “Wheel of Fortune”, where an almost unbelieveably dim set of good, happy, honest Americans – one hispanic, one white and (to be honest) quite portly, and one black – did an absolute hack job of guessing some pretty easy clue phrases (it took forever to get “A thing of beauty”, the morons). Alan and I made reentry to our reality, and I was thankful.
Because we both have to get up tomorrow morning and face the world again. Good luck and Godspeed to all of us.