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this post is warming my grieving heart. It has displayed the least inflammatory discussion of this horrible, awful situation that ive seen on the internet this week. this website has always been a safe harbour for discourse, even when it gets loud or wild and people get heated and have to take a walk (or get banned). this is a website filled with rational, thoughtful, empathetic people and it's why i have stayed on it for 23 years.
rational, thoughtful, empathetic people know that there are right and wrongs in the world, even when they are being committed by or on your community. jews in israel, non-jews in israel, tourists in israel are dead at the hand of terrorism. we can say that without devolving into insanity. as soon as you say "babies are victims, but thats about it" you are not a serious person.
rational, throughout, empathetic people know that palestinian people are dead at the hand of both the israeli retalitions as well as by their own corrupt and terrorist government Hamas. No reasonable jew blames palestinians for Hamas' attrocities. No reasonable jew thinks the palestinian people are worthy of the pain inflicted on them through the apartheid-like occuptation by israel, no matter what the outcome of dissolving the occupation would or wouldnt be for the state of israel.
rational, thoughtful, empathetic people know that saying things like "only 1 side..." *insert dot dot dot dot dot of your choice* is unhelpful, dishonest, and dismissive of context and nuance. and if you say there is no context or nuance, and you STILL say that after this week, jeez louise. I guess you have it ALL figured out.
Not that I should have to qualify this, but I am culturally jewish only. I am an anti-zionist. I don't care about who lives on israeli land and who doesnt. But simply being in Israel does not mean you are worthy of absorbing the sins of Israel's government. It cant. My grandparents met as teens in the Warsaw ghetto at the onset of the Nazis invasion of Poland. They were able to escape the trains to Aushwitz to siberia where they were in a displaced peoples camp. They learned all of their 13 combined siblings AND parents were killed by the nazis. my grandparents married in Siberia. they were rejected by the US and ended up in Montreal. tThey had 3 sons, 1 of them my dad.
Nearly 20 years after the holocaust, in the mid-late 1960s, my grandfather received a letter that 1 sibling he was told had been killed by the nazis had in fact also escaped the camps and ended up being brought to recently established jewish state of israel in 1949 I believe. Without getting into the thousands of years of fighting and slaughtering, Israel was a place he could go. He didnt have a home in Poland anymore. No one else would take him. He also thought his entire family had been killed by the nazis. When he found out my grandfather was alive, his older brother, and that he was in Montreal, they connected in a letter. My grandfather had NO interest in ever going to Israel. He was a yiddish speaking socialist and atheist due to what he had seen and survived and he wanted nothing to do with going to Israel. But he sent my dad, the first born Canadian child to Israel, alone by himself as a now 13 year old boy who had never been on a plane to visit his uncle he never knew he had to have his bar mitzvah.
What is my point with this? People were killed in an attack in Israel this weekend and in the days since. Most of those people were innocent jews. Many were not jewish. Many were taken hostage and dragged back to Gaza by Hamas where they will almost certainly be tortured and killed. Who will kill them? Maybe Israeli rockets. Maybe by their captors. But if you think they are GUILTY and worthy of that because of the conditions inflicted on the Palestinian people by governements and terrorists. My uncle is dead, but his wife is a 95 year old woman who has been sleeping in her "safe room" with her helper all week. My 102 year old grandmother died in Montreal 2 years ago last month. Her husband, my grandfather died at 91 a number of years ago. They could have been rejected by Canada, like so many, and ended up in Israel, too, one of the only places that jews could definitely land in post-WW2. They could have been killed and burned alive in a kibbutz this weekend while they slept. They would have been oppressors worthy of terrorism? Of course not. I cant believe most of those saying Israel has no victims (except for maybe babies...wow) would tell me that to my face.
People were killed in Gaza this weekend, and in the days since. Most of them are innocent Palestinians. Many will die because hostages taken back to Gaza by Hamas are in buildings, places of worship, hospitals, that are filled with palestinian people that have nothing to do with this and want nothing to do with this. The israeli governement and IDF with the support of ally governements who support, endorse, and even help israel's retaliatory and violent and escalating response for various, probably self-interested reasons over humanitarian ones, will kill many innocent people.
Victims of this disgusting awful war, will be victims whether some people want to acknowledge that or not. When someone says this both-sides-ing...do they feel some sort of moral highground? Do they even really feel that way or is it just what their polarized communities look for them to say?
I don't believe people are inherently this myopic. We can grieve and grieve for victims. And if we can't, we can at least not tell victims "actually, its really simple. you're not a victim cause dot dot dot" ********************************************************************
"I *always* quote myself. I'm the only reliable source on *most* subjects" - OKP's First Lady of Knowledge, Janey
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