We Cannot Forget Gaza

Dear Lovely Reader,

For weeks now I have been wanting to write something that basically boils down to why we cannot forget Gaza and the West Bank and the daily horrors that the Palestinians continue to endure. I had a bunch of ways to approach it, I kept making up excuses as to why none of my ideas were good enough. I felt there were so many other great writers in this space who were articulating this so beautifully and brilliantly, and I don’t want clog up your email unless it is something equally worthwhile.

Will this be brilliant? Probably not. But I had an important thought that I want to share with you—something for which I wish I had the answer, but I don’t.

And I have to say, I think this is why I am writing in this space: so I can, in the smallest way, contribute to finding the answer. Because we cannot go on like this—we simply cannot.

(I also have a burgeoning theory about how we are changing. I’ll share that too.)

So here goes. Prepare for some jumping around, I tend to do that as I go to different places pulling at different threads to come to conclusions. I hope you will bear with me.

This evening I was listening to a wonderful Podcast called The Book Club on Spotify. I highly recommend it if you love reading. This particular episode was focused on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A book I have not read (sad to say) and I had been putting off this episode so I could read the book first, finally I gave in and just listened. The two podcasters of the The Book Club are awesome because they also go into the history of the writer and the times when the book was written. I have to say I was horrified listening to their account of what happens in the book, of what the characters had suffered through. It reminded me of another book I once read that filled me with a similar feeling of shock and dread.

I don’t know if you are a lover of literature, Dear Reader, but I am. I love it not so much for the artistry as for the humanity—the stories of other people, other lives, deep love, loss, resilience, and the extraordinary spirit to survive. Years ago, I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It is one of the most horrifying books I have ever encountered. The horror comes from what it imagines: the depths of depravity humanity might sink to in a post-apocalyptic world. It shows us what we could become under the worst possible circumstances.

What struck me listening to the discussion of Beloved was the realization that the cruelty in Beloved is NOT imagined. The atrocities we hear about, we know happened and it makes it that much worse. Beloved asks us to confront what human beings have already been capable of.

There is the history of those who suffered. But there is also the history of those who convinced themselves that other human beings were less than human—who gave themselves permission to commit acts that would otherwise have been unthinkable.

I say all this because we are in a moment RIGHT NOW, when similar dehumanizing acts are happening again. And before anyone gets upset, I am not saying slavery and Gaza are the same thing. They are not. What I am saying is that they spring from the same human impulse. The impulse that allows us to stop seeing other people as fully human. The impulse that allows us to excuse ourselves from our very worst acts.

I’m a GenXer, I grew up learning about the Holocaust. I learned about Vietnam. I learned about Slavery. I learned about all the terrible moments in history when people crossed a line and committed acts that should never have happened. The destruction of Gaza is happening on my watch. And that horrifies me. It should not be happening. That was the whole point of teaching us the history - all the books ….all the stories. All those humans ….we wanted to believe that at least it would never happen again. That we would learn and be better.

And it is not just what we are witnessing that is so disturbing and outrageous, we also have to listen to the arguments. The justifications. The explanations. The endless discussions about whether this word or that word applies. Somewhere beneath all of those arguments are human beings - who are suffering, who are literally being buried.

I hear people say, "Well, until they can prove it is a genocide..." If we are even having that conversation, we have a problem. A huge problem. And perhaps that is the thing we never seem to learn, the thing that has me gob smacked in real time as I watch and listen, and hear nothing from so many who learned the same lessons I did. Where are their voices? There should be more outrage - much more. There should be more conversations. This should be fucking over.

And central to all this is the realization that we are capable of the very worst imaginable - this is something that does not change with time. It seems to be a very human quality. We have the ability to excuse ourselves from our very worst acts. We have the ability to give ourselves permission to say “they are animals” and then commit horrors ourselves. Horrors that goes against the very nature of animals. It is extraordinary that we manage to ignore or overlook this paradox - over, and over, and over again.

We have the ability to say, "They brought it upon themselves." While we commit the most unforgivable crimes upon them.

We have the ability to say, "There is no other choice." When the whole point is - there is ALWAYS another choice. That is why we learned about this growing up - so that we choose something else.

That was the revelation that hit me listening to a discussion about Beloved. I thought I was listening to a conversation about the past, about a different group of people who had suffered the unimaginable—worse than any Stephen King horror. And also about a group of depraved people who no longer existed: the slave owners. Only to realize I was listening to a conversation that spoke as much to the present as it did to the past. A conversation that spoke of the enduring human capacity for cruelty, dehumanization, and moral blindness.

It is so sad when you realize history is not in a museum or a book but is in fact a mirror of the present, and that present is playing out in Gaza and the West Bank right now.

BUT

… and this is a small but that has the potential to grow. I do think something awesome is being born right now. For the first time in history, ordinary people can tell their own stories directly to one another. We are able to get to know families in Iran - and hear their stories and see their humanity. We can hear and watch feedback from people in China and we now hear the Palestinian experience from Palestinians themselves - YES, Jerry Seinfeld they exist, as does their suffering, as does their land - Palestine. A land that is a land no matter how much Israel would like to erase it from a map. You cannot erase an actual land and you cannot erase its history or its people. Israel is a created State, born 78 years ago. Palestine is a land and there are people who were on that land for centuries. That is a truth and it needs to be dealt with…with love, accountability and some form of collective atonement.

It needs to be dealt with because what we are witnessing and what Palestinians are suffering through - have suffered through for decades, is unbearable, and it is coming from the worst part of ourselves. We know its wrong - we ALL know its wrong and anytime we find ourselves making excuses - dehumanizing another group of people, so we can commit the very worst crimes against them, whether for power, profit, revenge, or to exorcise our own fear and hatred—we have lost. We have failed. The holocaust taught us that. Slavery taught us that….both different - both horrific, and still hear we are again.

BUT….this disruptive technology has given us the ability to see in real time. We can witness events for ourselves. We can question the narrative. We can talk to one another and compare what we are seeing.

“Did you see that?”

“I saw it too.”

We can hear directly from people outside our own group and understand that it is not just us. We are no longer wholly dependent on the stories handed down to us by governments, institutions, or the powerful. More and more, we are refusing to buy the bullshit. We are saying no. We just need to keep saying it—more often and more loudly. We need to have the uncomfortable conversations. We need to acknowledge the very worst in ourselves—what history, and beautiful stories like Beloved and The Road, show us about what human beings are capable of.

And we must always, always, always listen to the better part of ourselves.

Because history has shown us what the worst part of ourselves is capable of. And it may never go away.