Actually an Artist

Seeking a non-dualistic response to the crisis in Israel and Palestine

Hamas killed over a thousand people two weeks ago in an act of terror compared to 9/11. And much like the United States’ response back in 2001, Israel has responded by attacking an area with many people who had nothing to do with the attack. I was in middle school that year, and remember the anger, fear, and feelings of righteousness when we attacked Afghanistan. And then two years later when we invaded Iraq. I’m not interested in investigating these wars or the counterterrorism they were reportedly for; others can do that much more accurately than I can. What interests me is the feelings of insecurity, fear, and Islamophobia that went into both these military debacles. What pains me is the death and suffering of the innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq who saw their whole world turned upside down in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ by a foreign power. And equally the pain and suffering of US Army soldiers who were sent abroad for supposedly lofty goals.

Netanyahu immediately declared “We are at war”-that was what I heard even before the full report of the carnage was available. What is clear to me two weeks later is that the response is much like the US’s response in the Middle East twenty years ago; they’re painting with a wide brush, to put it euphemistically. I see the same pain and anger in the Israeli response as we saw in the US in 2001. The same random attacks against members of another group as happened in the US. Just as instances of Islamophobic attacks happened in the US, (including Sihks because Americans don’t understand world religions), Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinians in the West Bank. Again, I’m not writing this to examine or relay the information, there are news agencies for that. But to set the scene for an empathetic response to everyone involved, because sharing the pain of this moment is the only way toward a better path. More killing did not help the US, and it won’t help Israel either. I also share this all because of the similar power dynamics involved, and the parallels involving Islamophobia in these terror attacks¹.

What I most want to address is the level of discourse happening in various communities I’m a part of. I see a lot of unequivocal support for Israel or Palestine without much recognition of the deep wounds on both sides. Hamas does not represent Palestinians and uses them just as it is using the hostages it took on October seventh, but the conflation is happening both in discourse and in the actions of the IDF. Honestly, I don’t think you mount a military operation that actually involved no civilian casualties, because I don’t think that’s ever happened in the over twenty years since the US got involved in Afghanistan and Iraq. The dualistic trap in this situation is in thinking that Israel being safe is somehow incongruent with Palestine being safe. But this is exactly what I see knee-jerk reactions to all the time. Saying “Free Palestine” is interpreted as antisemitic and publicly lamenting the lost Israeli families is seen as supporting genocide in the Gaza strip. We can’t get anywhere with this polarization and misrepresentation of the complexity of grief. A lot more grace and resistance to making a knee-jerk response to someone else’s expression of (perhaps partial) fear, sadness, or grief would go a long way in holding space for this lament.

The complicated simplicity of it all is this: we have to stop killing. We have to stop expecting that killing will make us safer when time and time again we see how wrong that is. “Every war is a war against children,” a quote that I came up on today. It’s from Eglantyne Jebb who founded Save the Children after the First World War. The destruction is already horrific, and it will only get worse if the IDF continues its offensive. The images of parents and children have been the hardest for me to see and sit with. Parents who just want to do whatever they can for their children. I know that deep, all consuming feeling. And if we can’t recognize it in another person simply because of what ‘group they belong to’ then we’ve already sacrificed our humanity. In a world that wants to say only Palestinians or only Israelis, we have to look for the third way. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but if we lead with empathy for the pain and suffering, I’m pretty sure we could get somewhere better than this. If we enter into the pain and suffering, even better. We all bear the burden of lament, whether we acknowledge it or not.

1. I’m somewhat reassured that Biden, in his address on 10/18, made some of the same parallels between these attacks and responses. See here for his speech. ↩︎