WAITING FOR A CEASE-FIRE

Random Notes After Seven Months of War in Gaza

Random Note #1:

In the age when pronouns are being reassigned more easily than sex, one pronoun is used as it always has been: the first person plural — We. But “we” doesn’t mean everybody and too often it is used as a synonym for the idea of “all”.

Ever since the police riot at the 1968 Chicago convention, this slogan has been the fervent hope of demonstrators. It isn’t always the case

The true synonym for We, in the social sense, is “some”. We “all” agree more often means, “some” of us agree.

It’s easy to lose sight of that when you are inside a tent encampment. Because there, “we” really does mean “all”. The energy force field uniting people stirred by political righteousness is mighty to those inside it.

You can equally lose sight of that fact watching dramatic footage of police clearing away a tent city at Columbia University. It does seem like “all” students are involved.

A little context never hurts:

US higher education enrollment is roughly 18.5 million. This is slightly less than it was before the pandemic. There are approximately four thousand universities and junior colleges. Three-quarters of these insitutions are state funded.

There are pro-Palestinian demonstrations at a little over 100 of them. Most are at elite (meaning selective and expensive) institutions: private and public. UCLA is a public institution with a national reputation and charges $43 thousand per year to out of state students who make up about a quarter of its student body. The University of Wisconsin at Madison draws more than half its students from out of state. They pay $40 thousand a year.

So, while the story dominated the news last week, in fact, the students demonstrating are an ultra minority of a minority within their institutions & within the socio-economic structure of the U.S.

Going back to the Sixties at least, student activists have demonstrated carrying in their hearts the final words of Percy Byshhe Shelley in the Masque of Anarchy:

Ye are many—they are few!

Sadly, in most cases students really are the few. The minority nature of the current crop of demonstrations was reinforced by this picture taken at the biggest public gathering in the US last week:

NFL Draft, Detroit (C) Detroit Free Press

275,000 people were in downtown Detroit for the first night of the NFL draft. More than 12 million watched the first round on various television and streaming platforms. (according to USA Today)

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Random Note #2":

It is hard to acknowledge when the embracing concept of “we” no longer extends to everyone in our circle. This is a particular difficulty of the social media age. You meet strangers through random common interests and become friends/followers, then emotionally intimate without any physical proximity. The complexity of human relationships are sanded away in a process of communication that removes the complexity of social, political, philosophical thought.

October 7th demolished the all-encompassing notion of “we”. Many people I thought I knew, instantly joined those who saw Hamas’s day of butchery as Israel’s fault and loudly proclaimed the fact on Twitter. It was a shock for me.

When the IDF began its ferocious onslaught on Gaza City and I failed to condemn it as civilian casualties mounted, some of those people who shocked me were in turn astounded and disappointed by my failure to demand an end to Israel’s retaliation.

All the above is a preamble to saying one of the most difficult things for me to acknowledge in recent years has been that my idea of Israel and its relationship to my understanding of what it means to be Jewish is no longer what “we” Jews “all” think. The Tel Aviv twinned with New York, liberal idea that existed when I started Hebrew school in the late 1950s, no longer exists.

Israeli identity has always been separate from American Jewish identity. But when I was a kid I think the differences were less stark. The founding generation of Israeli leaders were my grandparents’ generation and from the same places that my grandparents came from and in many ways had similar ideas about education and culture. Their experience of creating and fighting for a Jewish state made them psychologically harder and physically stronger. That confidence was maybe the biggest difference, of course.

On my first trip to Israel in 1971, once you got beyond language, the differences between myself and Israelis didn’t seem that great. But three generations, at least 10 wars and several intifadas, plus massive re-settlement of Jews from Arab countries have created a society that is very different to the one I collected money from my aunts and uncles to plant a tree in back in 1957.

Israeli society today is instinctively aggressive and untrusting of the world. Its electoral system may be dysfunctional but the fact that Israeli government after Israeli government has pursued policies that do not address the Palestinian question with anything like the mercy and justice that those in a position of overwhelming power should, is an expression of the will of the Israeli people.

I wish it wasn’t. I subscribe to a substack called Israel Diaries which is published by Sheri Oz. My guess is we are roughly the same age, she too grew up in North America, in her case Toronto, and made aliyah back in the 1970s. I doubt we would agree much about the present situation. I read her substack because she gives many Israeli voices, not just liberal ones, a hearing and this week’s dispatch included these words from an Israeli commander of a unit currently operating in Gaza. The commander says things that I think many American Jews, most of whom still vote Democrat, don’t want to hear:

“We are being undermined here; at the same time that a terrorist shoots at our soldiers - he looks up to the sky and sees humanitarian aid coming down to him

…

The way things are going, America is dictating what we are doing from A to Z, and the IDF has become an official subcontractor of the USA.”

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Random Note #3:

I wrote about the Fauda fallacy, back in October, in the early days of the Hamas war. I want to return to that extraordinary television show again, to one scene in particular which takes place in, I think, season 2.

There is a character, a Palestinian Authority security liaison officer in the West Bank who discovers that his son has fallen into an ISIS-like organization. The youth is arrested. The officer gets his son released from jail for a day and they drive to Yafo. They have coffee at a rooftop cafe overlooking the Mediterranean. In the background of the shot, we see the glass towers of 21st century Tel Aviv, just a few miles away.

In the scene, the father asks his son to look at the the city to the north. The camera does, the image makes clear that Israel is permanent. Look, the character says, the Jews are not going away, a few suicide bombs won’t destroy the country.

His son must accept that fact.

It’s a brilliant piece of writing and in this moment it is Israelis who need to be reminded of that fact: not even the atrocity of October 7th will destroy Israel. Only Israelis can destroy their country.

In 2017, just before the show’s second season began screening in the US, Fauda was given the benediction of the Chief Rabbi of New York high culture, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine. Remnick profiled the authors of that scene, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff. Issacharoff told the editor:

“We left Gaza and they won’t let us leave it behind. The Israeli public just wants to bury the Palestinians beyond the wall, to be on defense and to live their lives on their own. But how long can that last? I don’t know. But I know that we are heading toward a catastrophe. Either we’re ending the Zionist dream—ending our status as a Jewish democratic state—or we will become one state for two peoples. Sooner or later, the status quo will explode. It won’t hold. Either the Palestinians will explode or the international community will explode and say ‘No more apartheid’ and they will sit on our necks.”

Issacharoff was a prophet: the Palestinians exploded and now the international community will sit on Israel’s neck.

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Random Thought #4:

You learn something new about being a Jew all the time. This week I learned this phrase:

כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה

Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, which my friend and teacher, the great Frances Malino, who ran the Jewish studies dept at Wellesley College for decades, translates,"all Jews are responsible to one another." Talk about “we” meaning “all”.

I read the phrase in the preface to a novel she has just translated called Mazeltob.

This idea of all Jews being responsible to one another focused my never-ending thinking about what my responsibility as a Diaspora Jew is to Jews in Israel who are under fire, traumatised and poorly led.

Waiting for a cease-fire this is what I think:

My responsibility is to be clear-headed and rational and not give in to fear because I am safe (comparatively). I can use this place of safety to assess the situation calmly and speak the truth about it to my traumatized co-religionists.

In other words, I must be the perfect visitor to a house in sudden mourning. Offer strength and assurance that the pain will pass. Talk about ways out of grief and anger and never ending desire for vengeance. Lean on me, as we lean on you when hate comes our way in the diaspora. Don't try to out-mourn the mourners, don't geschrei louder than the family who has lost a loved one.

And since one Substack is never enough, read my other one:

Introduction: An Exile’s Story