Note: I have edited, and added to, this post several times since it went live. This is because my thoughts on this subject are a mess, and there’s a good chance they present as such in the material below.
GRADY: We’re trying to solve a problem here, Billy.
BILLY BEANE: Not like this, you’re not. You’re not even looking at the problem.
–Moneyball (2011)
I haven’t written about the situation in Gaza at all, going back to when it all began with the horrific and unprecedented attacks by Hamas terrorists against citizens of Israel on October 7, 2023. Why haven’t I mentioned it? Mainly because I find the topic of Middle Eastern violence unbelievably saddening, and I have no answers to offer on the situation. It’s been that way since before I was born, and more than that, it’s been that way since thousands of years before I was born.
But maybe that’s not a good enough reason to avoid discussing it entirely. At some point one must offer a testimony to one’s humanity by noting the horrors we keep making for ourselves. (“We” is meant to refer to the entire species here.) I don’t know if powerlessness is a good reason for silence. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
I did make one post on Facebook about the events that have taken place in Gaza since all of this current situation began. One, in reaction to a single incident in the ongoing Israeli response. A friend of mine who is actually an Israeli Jew took me to task for that post, and I had to quickly admit that she was right. I took down the post, and we shared an exchange of messages about what’s been happening over there.
My starting point here is that I have never liked or trusted Benjamin Netanyahu. He is far too conservative and belligerent for my tastes, and I do not trust his motivations or goals in the way he is prosecuting the current conflict. I think there is much to justifiably criticize of his worldview in general, and the way it is manifesting in the way he is directing the current war in Gaza.
Maybe it’s the liberal leftist peacenik in me, but I have found myself sympathetic to the throngs of people decrying the violence being visited upon innocent people in Gaza who have had Hamas thrust upon them for too long. Hamas is, after all, not a legitimate governmental body but a terrorist organization, and one of the most militant and violent, to boot. They have taken root in Gaza and assumed control of that region not through any legitimate means, and many Palestinians living in Gaza really are caught between awfulness on one side and a rage-filled response to that awfulness on the other. My sympathy was frustrated in the last American election by people who insisted that they would not vote for the existing administration under the assumption that there was some single act, or small selection of acts, that Joe Biden could have undertaken to end the violence entirely.
Those sympathies were real, but they had limits. And I’m not sure my limits were in the right place.
The Jewish Israeli friend I mention above, and another Jewish author friend, continued to decry what they saw as antisemitism on the part of people who protested the war. This I did not understand, for a long time. I did not see how disapproval of this war was also emblematic of disapproval of Jews in general.
But then, something clicked, during discussions over the last few days on Facebook regarding a recent release of Israeli prisoners by Hamas. One man, held since October 7, 2023, is reported to have stated eagerness to see his wife and children again, not knowing that his very captors murdered them that same day.
That was a brutal reminder that wars don’t happen in a vacuum, and there is never just one set of moral actors in any conflict. And someone, either one of my two friends or someone in their comments, noted something that stopped me in my tracks: Why did all the people who have condemned Israel’s response so stridently said nothing about anything that Hamas has done?
I’ll circle back to that in a minute. First, a literary memory.
(Yes, it will be relevant.)
There was an author in the 20th century named John D. Fitzgerald who is best known for a series of children’s books he wrote, called the Great Brain books. There’s no name for the entire series, but they start off with The Great Brain and those words feature in all the titles that followed. The books tell the story of a Catholic family living in rural Utah in the 1890s, and they are based on real events and experiences from Fitzgerald’s own life. The books are wildly entertaining, though they have admittedly not aged all that well in the nearly sixty years since the series began. As noted the books are loosely (very loosely, I later learned) autobiographical, and Fitzgerald writes them from his own viewpoint, but the main character–the “Great Brain” of the series–is his older brother Tom, who is incredibly intelligent and who never lets anybody forget it. He also has what Fitzgerald, writing as “J.D.”, his younger self, calls a “money-loving heart”. Thomas spends the books cooking up one scheme after another to move money from his brothers’ and his friends’ pockets into his own, and a lot of it is straight-up con-man stuff.
The books also depict what life might have been like in a small Utah town back then. I do not remember if the books take place just before or just after Utah was admitted to the Union, but relationships with Mormons form part of the backbone of the stories, along with the trials and tribulations of young boys growing up in that environment. The depiction of masculinity in these books is admittedly not the best; corporal punishment is routine and accepted, and backing up one’s boasts with one’s fists was always necessary. It’s the kind of world where no dare could be ignored and no fight backed away from.
In one of the first couple books–I don’t recall which one–an old Jewish man moves in to town. His intention is to open his own general store and make his living that way. I honestly don’t remember much about his story, except the end. His name in the book was Abie. Somehow, it’s discovered that Abie is very ill, and it turns out that he’s very ill because he is literally starving to death. His store has failed miserably, he has no money, and he has no food. The Fitzgeralds gather around Abie to try to revive him and give him food, but it’s too late and Abie dies.
Later on, they’re all wondering why Abie never said anything, why they didn’t know that this nice old Jew had starved to death right in the middle of their own community where everyone theoretically cares about everyone else. Fitzgerald’s father, who runs the local newspaper and is often depicted in the books as the smartest man in the town, provides the answer: it’s precisely because Abie was a Jew.
I don’t have copies of these books at all, so I can’t quote them directly, but the reason no one noticed a starving Jew in their own neighborhood was horrible and blunt (and honestly shocking, coming in the middle of a book that’s mostly an entertaining story for middle-grade readers). This isn’t anywhere near the way Fitzgerald has anybody say it in the book, but it boils down very simply to this:
Nobody cares what happens to a Jew.
I’ve thought about that passage off and on for many years. I read those books, several times, each, when I was a kid. I never understood it, not really, or why author Fitzgerald chose to put such a sad and stark lesson right in the middle of a children’s lit novel. And I still don’t, but Fitzgerald was himself a journalist and writer for a time and he wrote his novels in the 1960s, when knowledge of the Holocaust was still pretty new.
I haven’t understood it. I have to be honest about that. I took that anecdote, which stands quite alone in Fitzgerald’s books, to refer to our failure to address with concern the needs of people who are strangers to our community, to people who are “other”. There’s a lot of truth to that, yes. But I suspect that anyone who is a Jew who read those books recognized a different lesson loud and clear: it’s not just an illustration of general suspicion of people who are “other”, it’s that throughout just about all of human history during which Jews existed, Jews have always been “other”.
Back to the main problem, then.
That quote at the top of this post is a useful one, I think. It comes from a movie about baseball, but it’s absolutely true that you can’t hope to solve a problem unless you’ve at least actually identified the problem.
So what is the problem here, today, in Gaza and elsewhere?
It’s a problem with a lot of horrible facets, that much is sure. Can it be reduced to a single sentence? Here’s one way Aaron Sorkin summed it up in The West Wing:
PRESIDENT BARTLET: Ellie had a teacher named Mr. Pordy, who had no interest in nuance. He asked the class why there’s always been conflict in the Middle East and Ellie raised her hand and said “It’s a centuries old religious conflict involving land and suspicions and culture and…” “Wrong.” Mr. Pordy said, “It’s because it’s incredibly hot and there’s no water.”
Is that all it is? I honestly don’t know. That’s probably a bigger piece of it than many prefer to admit, but…well, come on, now. I have no idea what Sorkin was getting at when he wrote that. Yes, there’s a lot of hot and arid country in that part of the world. There are also several great river valleys that saw the rise of some of the greatest early civilizations in the history of our species.
All the other stuff can’t be discounted. Ancient religious hatreds can’t be ignored. (And lest I turn this into a screed against Aaron Sorkin, it baffles me that he takes this route here, because in the first season he dramatized a conflict between India and Pakistan that he directly attributed to “the Subcontinent’s religious malevolence”.) But when we look at the current events in Gaza, and when we’re confronted by people who are rightly horrified by the suffering being visited upon the Palestinians in that land, there’s a question, or a series of questions, that my Jewish friends, and only my Jewish friends, have asked:
Where is the similar condemnation of the attacks on October 7, 2023?
That question leads to others:
Are the Israelis to ignore those attacks? Are they allowed to make response to that level of unprovoked viciousness? Are they supposed to just…accept it? Take it?
And those questions lead to more, which ultimately boil down to one question:
Why is the suffering of Jews just a thing that’s to be accepted in this world?
I have no answer to that. I’m not sure an answer exists that satisfies. I mean, there is an obvious answer to that: it’s just good old garden-variety as-old-as-the-hills anti-Semitism.
So my question ends up being, Why in the world is anti-Semitism so permanent? How is it still a thing? Because I have to conclude that this is very much a part of the constant and ongoing discussion. After a year and a half of listening to folks online and off decrying this war, and as saddened as I am by the war and by my new President’s insanely unhelpful statements about what’s to come, I do have to wonder why it really seems as if the general idea is that the people of Israel, and by extension the worldwide Jewish community, are just supposed to suffer in silence. The suffering of Jews is just factored in, it seems. It’s the cost of doing business.
It saddens me that I’m just now seeing this. My Jewish friends have seen it all their lives, and their parents saw it, and their parents saw it before them. And their children are seeing it.
I’ve seen many protests on behalf of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza, but I haven’t seen any on behalf of the innocents on both sides of this horror, and that has to include Israelis. It has to include Jews. October 7, 2023 was one of the most horrific days for the worldwide Jewish community since the Holocaust itself ended. Were they really to make no response to this? Or have they made the wrong response? If the latter, then…what is the right response? I’m not seeing any of these questions being asked, and it seems to me they need to be. I understand the impulse to center the suffering of the Palestinian community in Gaza as everything has been unfolding, but too often that kind of commentary has shaded toward the idea that the Israelis contributed to the problem in the first place. And as a historical matter, there is absolutely some truth to that, because there is always some truth to that. Events like October 7, 2023 don’t happen out of nowhere.
But we have to be very careful about that line of thinking, because it’s really easy to frame that argument in such a way as to grant the premise that Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023 were a reasonable and justifiable response to something Israel did previously. And I am unwilling to go that far.
I don’t know what the solution here is. I don’t know that endless war, and a concurrent and constant turning up of the heat, is ever going to accomplish anything. But I think that any movement toward any kind of lasting peace in that region must start with a rejection of the idea, subconscious though it may be, that there exists in this world a population of human beings whose suffering is just baked in to the whole affair. We really do seem largely accepting of the suffering of the Jews, and I don’t believe any of these issues can be solved without acknowledging that. Without looking at the whole problem.
Comments are off for this post. Also, I feel it necessary to note what is screamingly obvious: I am not a Jew, so these thoughts are those of an outsider who cannot ever fully grapple with this entire problem the way someone who is actually IN that community can.
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No answers….
Note: I have edited, and added to, this post several times since it went live. This is because my thoughts on this subject are a mess, and there’s a good chance they present as such in the material below.
I haven’t written about the situation in Gaza at all, going back to when it all began with the horrific and unprecedented attacks by Hamas terrorists against citizens of Israel on October 7, 2023. Why haven’t I mentioned it? Mainly because I find the topic of Middle Eastern violence unbelievably saddening, and I have no answers to offer on the situation. It’s been that way since before I was born, and more than that, it’s been that way since thousands of years before I was born.
But maybe that’s not a good enough reason to avoid discussing it entirely. At some point one must offer a testimony to one’s humanity by noting the horrors we keep making for ourselves. (“We” is meant to refer to the entire species here.) I don’t know if powerlessness is a good reason for silence. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
I did make one post on Facebook about the events that have taken place in Gaza since all of this current situation began. One, in reaction to a single incident in the ongoing Israeli response. A friend of mine who is actually an Israeli Jew took me to task for that post, and I had to quickly admit that she was right. I took down the post, and we shared an exchange of messages about what’s been happening over there.
My starting point here is that I have never liked or trusted Benjamin Netanyahu. He is far too conservative and belligerent for my tastes, and I do not trust his motivations or goals in the way he is prosecuting the current conflict. I think there is much to justifiably criticize of his worldview in general, and the way it is manifesting in the way he is directing the current war in Gaza.
Maybe it’s the liberal leftist peacenik in me, but I have found myself sympathetic to the throngs of people decrying the violence being visited upon innocent people in Gaza who have had Hamas thrust upon them for too long. Hamas is, after all, not a legitimate governmental body but a terrorist organization, and one of the most militant and violent, to boot. They have taken root in Gaza and assumed control of that region not through any legitimate means, and many Palestinians living in Gaza really are caught between awfulness on one side and a rage-filled response to that awfulness on the other. My sympathy was frustrated in the last American election by people who insisted that they would not vote for the existing administration under the assumption that there was some single act, or small selection of acts, that Joe Biden could have undertaken to end the violence entirely.
Those sympathies were real, but they had limits. And I’m not sure my limits were in the right place.
The Jewish Israeli friend I mention above, and another Jewish author friend, continued to decry what they saw as antisemitism on the part of people who protested the war. This I did not understand, for a long time. I did not see how disapproval of this war was also emblematic of disapproval of Jews in general.
But then, something clicked, during discussions over the last few days on Facebook regarding a recent release of Israeli prisoners by Hamas. One man, held since October 7, 2023, is reported to have stated eagerness to see his wife and children again, not knowing that his very captors murdered them that same day.
That was a brutal reminder that wars don’t happen in a vacuum, and there is never just one set of moral actors in any conflict. And someone, either one of my two friends or someone in their comments, noted something that stopped me in my tracks: Why did all the people who have condemned Israel’s response so stridently said nothing about anything that Hamas has done?
I’ll circle back to that in a minute. First, a literary memory.
(Yes, it will be relevant.)
There was an author in the 20th century named John D. Fitzgerald who is best known for a series of children’s books he wrote, called the Great Brain books. There’s no name for the entire series, but they start off with The Great Brain and those words feature in all the titles that followed. The books tell the story of a Catholic family living in rural Utah in the 1890s, and they are based on real events and experiences from Fitzgerald’s own life. The books are wildly entertaining, though they have admittedly not aged all that well in the nearly sixty years since the series began. As noted the books are loosely (very loosely, I later learned) autobiographical, and Fitzgerald writes them from his own viewpoint, but the main character–the “Great Brain” of the series–is his older brother Tom, who is incredibly intelligent and who never lets anybody forget it. He also has what Fitzgerald, writing as “J.D.”, his younger self, calls a “money-loving heart”. Thomas spends the books cooking up one scheme after another to move money from his brothers’ and his friends’ pockets into his own, and a lot of it is straight-up con-man stuff.
The books also depict what life might have been like in a small Utah town back then. I do not remember if the books take place just before or just after Utah was admitted to the Union, but relationships with Mormons form part of the backbone of the stories, along with the trials and tribulations of young boys growing up in that environment. The depiction of masculinity in these books is admittedly not the best; corporal punishment is routine and accepted, and backing up one’s boasts with one’s fists was always necessary. It’s the kind of world where no dare could be ignored and no fight backed away from.
In one of the first couple books–I don’t recall which one–an old Jewish man moves in to town. His intention is to open his own general store and make his living that way. I honestly don’t remember much about his story, except the end. His name in the book was Abie. Somehow, it’s discovered that Abie is very ill, and it turns out that he’s very ill because he is literally starving to death. His store has failed miserably, he has no money, and he has no food. The Fitzgeralds gather around Abie to try to revive him and give him food, but it’s too late and Abie dies.
Later on, they’re all wondering why Abie never said anything, why they didn’t know that this nice old Jew had starved to death right in the middle of their own community where everyone theoretically cares about everyone else. Fitzgerald’s father, who runs the local newspaper and is often depicted in the books as the smartest man in the town, provides the answer: it’s precisely because Abie was a Jew.
I don’t have copies of these books at all, so I can’t quote them directly, but the reason no one noticed a starving Jew in their own neighborhood was horrible and blunt (and honestly shocking, coming in the middle of a book that’s mostly an entertaining story for middle-grade readers). This isn’t anywhere near the way Fitzgerald has anybody say it in the book, but it boils down very simply to this:
Nobody cares what happens to a Jew.
I’ve thought about that passage off and on for many years. I read those books, several times, each, when I was a kid. I never understood it, not really, or why author Fitzgerald chose to put such a sad and stark lesson right in the middle of a children’s lit novel. And I still don’t, but Fitzgerald was himself a journalist and writer for a time and he wrote his novels in the 1960s, when knowledge of the Holocaust was still pretty new.
I haven’t understood it. I have to be honest about that. I took that anecdote, which stands quite alone in Fitzgerald’s books, to refer to our failure to address with concern the needs of people who are strangers to our community, to people who are “other”. There’s a lot of truth to that, yes. But I suspect that anyone who is a Jew who read those books recognized a different lesson loud and clear: it’s not just an illustration of general suspicion of people who are “other”, it’s that throughout just about all of human history during which Jews existed, Jews have always been “other”.
Back to the main problem, then.
That quote at the top of this post is a useful one, I think. It comes from a movie about baseball, but it’s absolutely true that you can’t hope to solve a problem unless you’ve at least actually identified the problem.
So what is the problem here, today, in Gaza and elsewhere?
It’s a problem with a lot of horrible facets, that much is sure. Can it be reduced to a single sentence? Here’s one way Aaron Sorkin summed it up in The West Wing:
Is that all it is? I honestly don’t know. That’s probably a bigger piece of it than many prefer to admit, but…well, come on, now. I have no idea what Sorkin was getting at when he wrote that. Yes, there’s a lot of hot and arid country in that part of the world. There are also several great river valleys that saw the rise of some of the greatest early civilizations in the history of our species.
All the other stuff can’t be discounted. Ancient religious hatreds can’t be ignored. (And lest I turn this into a screed against Aaron Sorkin, it baffles me that he takes this route here, because in the first season he dramatized a conflict between India and Pakistan that he directly attributed to “the Subcontinent’s religious malevolence”.) But when we look at the current events in Gaza, and when we’re confronted by people who are rightly horrified by the suffering being visited upon the Palestinians in that land, there’s a question, or a series of questions, that my Jewish friends, and only my Jewish friends, have asked:
Where is the similar condemnation of the attacks on October 7, 2023?
That question leads to others:
Are the Israelis to ignore those attacks? Are they allowed to make response to that level of unprovoked viciousness? Are they supposed to just…accept it? Take it?
And those questions lead to more, which ultimately boil down to one question:
Why is the suffering of Jews just a thing that’s to be accepted in this world?
I have no answer to that. I’m not sure an answer exists that satisfies. I mean, there is an obvious answer to that: it’s just good old garden-variety as-old-as-the-hills anti-Semitism.
So my question ends up being, Why in the world is anti-Semitism so permanent? How is it still a thing? Because I have to conclude that this is very much a part of the constant and ongoing discussion. After a year and a half of listening to folks online and off decrying this war, and as saddened as I am by the war and by my new President’s insanely unhelpful statements about what’s to come, I do have to wonder why it really seems as if the general idea is that the people of Israel, and by extension the worldwide Jewish community, are just supposed to suffer in silence. The suffering of Jews is just factored in, it seems. It’s the cost of doing business.
It saddens me that I’m just now seeing this. My Jewish friends have seen it all their lives, and their parents saw it, and their parents saw it before them. And their children are seeing it.
I’ve seen many protests on behalf of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza, but I haven’t seen any on behalf of the innocents on both sides of this horror, and that has to include Israelis. It has to include Jews. October 7, 2023 was one of the most horrific days for the worldwide Jewish community since the Holocaust itself ended. Were they really to make no response to this? Or have they made the wrong response? If the latter, then…what is the right response? I’m not seeing any of these questions being asked, and it seems to me they need to be. I understand the impulse to center the suffering of the Palestinian community in Gaza as everything has been unfolding, but too often that kind of commentary has shaded toward the idea that the Israelis contributed to the problem in the first place. And as a historical matter, there is absolutely some truth to that, because there is always some truth to that. Events like October 7, 2023 don’t happen out of nowhere.
But we have to be very careful about that line of thinking, because it’s really easy to frame that argument in such a way as to grant the premise that Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023 were a reasonable and justifiable response to something Israel did previously. And I am unwilling to go that far.
I don’t know what the solution here is. I don’t know that endless war, and a concurrent and constant turning up of the heat, is ever going to accomplish anything. But I think that any movement toward any kind of lasting peace in that region must start with a rejection of the idea, subconscious though it may be, that there exists in this world a population of human beings whose suffering is just baked in to the whole affair. We really do seem largely accepting of the suffering of the Jews, and I don’t believe any of these issues can be solved without acknowledging that. Without looking at the whole problem.
Comments are off for this post. Also, I feel it necessary to note what is screamingly obvious: I am not a Jew, so these thoughts are those of an outsider who cannot ever fully grapple with this entire problem the way someone who is actually IN that community can.
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