I Think This Is How Your Jewish Friends Are Feeling
Part One of a response to the aftermath of the October 7 massacres
Not just Israelis, but Jews around the world are feeling angry, bereft and scared right now. Israel the country is literally shut down, psychologically traumatized, and under attack by Hezbollah from the North. It has a citizen army and is mobilized for war in the South which means that everyone knows someone whose life is on the line.
The People of Israel, “Am Yisrael,” comprises barely 15 million Jews around the world, so when half of us are in deep anguish, we feel it as a family, but we, in the diaspora, also feel it because, after the most brutal attack on Jews since the Nazis nearly annihilated us, people are on the streets of London, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, never mind Beirut, Tunis, Tehran, or Amman, calling for the further death of Jews.
This is part one of three notes I’ve written to try to make sense of the most traumatic Jewish moment in the past 50 years. I’ve tried to write them for my friends who are adjacent to the conflict, trying to give a sense of the nuances of the situation, but also the deep pain on both sides. I want to talk about how I’m making sense of it from the middle of the progressive Jewish experience — which is the majority Jewish experience. I want to explain how we feel in the aftermath of the October 7 massacres, as someone who has worked for human rights in general and, for Palestinian rights and co-existence in the Middle East in particular, from a very Jewish angle.
I’ll get more things wrong than usual. But I know you — and any friends you send these to — will forgive me. It’s a difficult time.
Part one explains how I am feeling now — and I think I speak for a few friends and family — almost two weeks on from an attack that was filmed on GoPros and streamed for posterity by Hamas. I want to send this out before shabbat arrives in New York.
Part two explains why the contemporary politics of the conflict are so complicated. If you think they’re simple, you don’t understand.
Part three explains how the historical worldview of the different sides of the conflict are totally different and, in many ways, incompatible.
At the moment, though, Jewish families around the world are feeling many things, most importantly, perhaps, four things.
1. Anger and sorrow about our brothers and sisters who were savagely killed, brutalized, or taken hostage on October 7.
2. Fear that we Jews are being dehumanized by those we thought were our friends, being blamed for a conflict deliberately provoked by a Hamas’ terror attack. Fear that we are in danger from the rising tide of hatred that afflicts the simple-minded on both sides, blaming Jews — and Muslims — for genocide.
3. Deep empathy and grief for the innocent Palestinian and Israeli civilians who are dead, wounded, captive, under constant threat and who continue to die every day as rockets fly.
4. Profoundly weary that hatred is flourishing. Far from the peace that most of us have worked so hard to achieve, antisemitism is spiking, the Middle East is alight again, and neither Israel nor the West are any refuge from the pogroms and Jew hatred we thought we had moved on from.
On top of these four visceral feelings, we’re all caught up in the information war. Reasonable people are talking irresponsibly, and unreasonable people are reveling in the havoc they can wield. We’re unsurprised that ideological media is spewing its predictable, unhelpful pablum, and we’re angry that, after a decade of conspiracy theories, virulent sexism, anti-vaxxing, climate denial, election denial and murder manifestos, algorithmic platforms of user-generated ad content are still able to proliferate hate for profit.
And we feel betrayed by supposedly reliable fact-based media who too often feed the frenzy, instead of getting to the facts and condemning the hatred. The thoughtless repetition of the Hamas press release about the rocket and the hospital before any fact-checking was done was just the most egregious moment of White Christian privilege by outlets (BBC, Sky, New York Times, CNN) that will not be the first target of the hate their headlines stirred.
As well as provoking angry anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations around the world, those headlines sabotaged President Biden’s visit to Jordan which could have been the key to minimising this conflict.
I’m going to go and hug my family, as Jews across the world are doing with added poignancy these days. Because it feels like a strange and ominous world we’ve brought them into. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” — we have a lot of work to do to bring that arc back the right way.
Shabbat Shalom