Don’t Go Changing

Look. I am not pro-Palestine. I am not anti-Israel. My-mother-the-history-teacher sat me down in front of the movie Exodus when I was 12, FFS, and narrated all the ways it got history right and wrong, and why it was politically a miracle that Israel existed. This is the same mother who, in the run-up to Christmas every year, reminded us kids during our Advent rituals that Jews celebrated a different holiday, and what its traditions were, and why they were important and valid and should be respected. (RESPECTED, not co-opted or mimicked, which is why FUCK NO WE DID NOT LIGHT A MENORAH JFC NO UGH) This might not seem all that out of the mainstream, except it was in the early 70’s, remember, and in central Indiana, not exactly a hotbed of social progressiveness. Menorash didn’t join nativity scenes in town holiday displays until the 80’s, IIRC and it was controversial then.

Same mother who used so much everyday Yiddish we thought those were just, ya know, words, except no one outside the house used them. The same woman who made sure all her children knew the Holocaust was bad, and Nazis were bad, and that yes it could happen here, that the US was full of Nazis up to and through WW2, and backed it up with loads of facts and citations and recommended reading.

All this might have a lot to do with her growing up in Hyde Park during WW2, with some friends who had concentration camp tattoos on their forearms, and many more whose families had been shattered by the loss of relatives, friends and communities thanks to the genocides of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. But what it MEANS is that I have enjoyed a lifelong respect for Judaism, Jewish culture, and the state of Israel. And I’ve always wanted it to succeed and I’ve always wanted to see peace come to the Middle east. The Israel-Egypt peace accords were a pivotal event of my childhood, FFS.

(the same history teacher mother encouraged a deep dive research into Middle East history after viewings of Lawrence Of Arabia complete with sidebar commentary on British colonialism and its corrosive impact on the region’s development…)

But the state of Israel is not the same thing as Jewish culture or Judaism. And peace in the Middle Easy is an ideal struggling against THOUSANDS of years of conflicts caused by convoluted cultural and religious differences, then complicated by colonialism and other outside influences, and poisoned by the presence of fossil fuels, just to name a few of the complexities.

No one who isn’t involved in those centuries-old bloody traditions has any business having a position on the existence of those states. There is no One Righteous Answer. There can be no Singular Solution. So when it comes to the political arguments of validity, I am not qualified to be pro-Palestinian or anti-Palestinian, pro-Israel or anti-Israel.

But damn, I sure can tell when someone is doing an atrocity.

The events on 7 October, 2023 were an atrocity.

Most of what Israel’s government has perpetrated on the residents of Gaza since then has been a two-year-long atrocity. Call it genocide. Don’t call it genocide. I don’t have the philosophical expertise to debate a single word.

But I know killing children lined up for food and water at relief stations is an atrocity. Bombing hospitals on purpose, that’s an atrocity too. People who do that do not get to claim a moral high ground.

I could go on, but I don’t need to. That’s enough.