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Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
Anger. Fear. Frustration. Horror. Outrage. Sadness.
These are just some of the emotions I’ve felt this week.
I first learned of Hamas’ brutal surprise attacks on Israelis on Saturday while in New York City with my youngest daughter. Then, on Tuesday, we unwittingly ended up in a crowd of people — men wearing yarmulkes, women with Star of David necklaces, some of them carrying Israeli flags — walking down 2nd Avenue near the United Nations.
Thousands of people of Jewish heritage gathered to grieve and support one another and their kin in a distant, bloodied country. In snippets of conversation, I heard people articulating a renewed sense of unity and concern. But, also of confusion and pessimism, rage and despair.
As a non-practicing Jew, whose mother escaped the Holocaust, I, in no way speak for anyone — Jewish or not — other than myself.
My mixture of emotions — none of them pleasant — comes from my jumbled heritage but also from my basic understanding of the complexity of the situation in Israel.
Here are some foundational thoughts, which are way oversimplified for sure. Killing, torturing and kidnapping civilians, particularly children and babies, is not a way to settle disagreements between governments or leaders. Yes, the Israeli government has long isolated Palestinians and deprived them of basic services. That does not in any way justify Hamas’ deliberate, terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.
This idea, which is not new or unique, is often attributed to Golda Meir, who was prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974: You cannot negotiate peace with someone who doesn’t recognize your right to exist. Of course, the government of Israel should stop its blockade of Palestinian civilians. At the same time, however, Hamas and its backers (namely Iran) must stop advocating for the elimination of Israel. When they say they seek a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, they literally mean they want to drive non-Arab Israelis (hence Jews) into the sea. Where do they want the 7 million non-Arab citizens of Israel to go? Back to their long-ago homelands of Austria, Poland, Hungary, Germany and other countries? Or do they simply want all non-Arabs in Israel literally dead? This sounds like genocide, an eery echo of Nazi Germany.
Thankfully, such an idea is repulsive to most world leaders, which leads us back to negotiations as a way to end thousands of years of disagreements over the rights and lands of the various people of the Middle East, with their varied religions and traditions. Sadly, however, we’ve seen where that has gotten us.
So, perhaps an overriding emotion is despair. Despair that generations of people have readily killed one another for land, for power, for control. How do we stop it?
While not offering an answer, Ori Weisberg, an author, musician, editor and translator who lives in Jerusalem, articulated what I was feeling — although he focused on one emotion: anger — very well in a recent Facebook post.
“I’m angry at Hamas about the vicious slaughter and widespread trauma they inflicted, gleefully, on so many people,” he wrote. “I’m angry at Israel’s vaunted security and intelligence communities and institutions, whose often appalling moral decisions and violations of rights have been justified with recourse to the necessity for security, for nonetheless failing to keep us safe.”
“I’m angry at Hamas for undercutting the struggle for Palestinian rights and lending credence to the caricatures of Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages who just want to kill Jews, which is far from the truth,” he added. “This will not only cost Palestinian lives in the immediate, but it will also set back their pursuit of justice and dignity by decades. They have alienated hard-won support in the international community. And they have made it harder to stand for their recognition, rights, and justice. Here, in Israel, it makes answering the refrain that ‘they don’t really want freedom, they just want us all dead and gone’ exponentially more difficult. And they have reinforced the flawed attitude that any failure of brutality to subjugate others is evidence of the need for more brutality.
“I’m angry at the harm that this will perpetuate for Israel and Israelis, now and in future generations, on so many levels. Dehumanizing themselves and us, dehumanizing us all, plunging us ever deeper into a morass of hatred and violence,” Weisberg wrote.
The brutal murder of Israeli civilians, and the killing of Palestinian militants and civilians in response, resumes and intensifies a brutal cycle that has spun for generations, even centuries.
Yet, because I am an optimist, I hope against hope that the current bloodshed has only temporarily derailed but doesn’t end the possibility of a solution that recognizes both Israel’s and Palestine’s right to exist. The alternative — a world where neither Israel nor Palestine or only one of them exists — is a world, as we now see, full of violence, terrorism and brutality. It is a world that should not be acceptable to anyone.