So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering… Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.
-Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
…His thoughts were unjust and inhumanely cruel…and all the way home he despised them until his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning those people took shape in his mind.
-Anton Chekhov, Enemies
Over the weekend I read my students' manuscripts, walked and talked with good friends, began reading Beverly Gage's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of J Edgar Hoover, Emma Goldman's autobiography, and Chekhov's short story, Enemies, cooked fresh vegetables into a stir fry, checked my email on my phone, skimmed the newspaper, and tried to stay off social media. I went out for a late lunch with my husband on Sunday and watched him feed the sparrows pieces of his bagel as gently as St. Augustine in that beautiful painting by Botticelli, though I might have made this up as I can't find the painting. No matter. What I want to convey here is the silence and peace that descended upon us as the sparrows flew away with their bounty, the air cooled, and the sun slipped over the Minnewaska Ridge.
Late, one of the weekend days, an offer came in from the New York Review of Books— $ 10 for 10 issues, print and digital—and I could not resist. Before the weekend was over I had read Jonathan Shulman's essay about what Israel must do to remain a viable, safe nation-state, and Aryeh Neir's essay about war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Neir is the internationally revered co-founder of Human Rights Watch and if he is contemplating changing his mind about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, so am I. He waited a long time before he used the word genocide to explain the Hamas instigated disaster, and the Israeli response. War crimes, certainly, even ethnic cleansing of the West Bank as the messianic settlers continue their nefarious actions. But this bombing of Gaza—hospitals, tent cities, schools, children—genocide loud and clear, Neir has decided. What made him change his mind was the refusal of the Israelis to permit humanitarian aid from entering the strip, famine weaponized, a breach of well-established international humanitarian law.
So, there it is: genocide. It's not easy for American descendants of pogroms and the Holocaust to acknowledge atrocities perpetrated by the Israelis. But they/we must.
If only I was a diplomat negotiating in a velvet curtained room, I might be able to remain calm and "objective." But I cannot. I have Israeli family, Palestinian friends. I embrace them all. I weep as I write, I work for peace.
For definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml