Dear All,
I have been having issues across all our communications mediums but have been writing a bit in response to the horrors taking place in and around Gaza, horrors which now occupy large swaths of public consciousness displacing, for the moment at least, other theaters of despair in Syria, in Sudan, in Myanmar, and in too many other global settings. Those who have felt compelled to “weigh in” on Gaza have too-often done so in ways that have created more enmity than clarity, providing views and “advice” which situations and peoples in crisis neither want nor need. My own response was probably too strong in its admonitions. This piece seeks to rectify as well as to clarify.
I wanted to follow up last week’s post which was not shared all that widely, perhaps for the best. It was, as you may recall, focused on the vast iterations of “weighing in” which have taken place since the Hamas attack earlier this month, sharing which often “jumped the gun” regarding key facts and insights, but also sharing views which (as with the attack and response itself) often have a long history of their own. This horror story unfolding on our screens and feeds has many brutal precedents punctuated by occasional bursts of hope and sanity, brutality which surely could have been resolved long ago if the so-called “great powers” had a mind to do so. It is unclear now who exactly has the courage at present to do more than put a cork in a bottle full of highly flammable liquid, to address the misery in drips and drabs (as we have now started to do) until the next wave of destruction seizes control of our minds and our media, ripping open the wounds which we have demonstrated the will to treat but not to heal.
Amidst all the images of carnage in Gaza, amidst the settler-related and other violence taking place in the occupied territories and threatening to break out on other of Israel’s borders, two things struck me once again this week. First off are the stories of people responding to circumstances they did not create with a kind of bewildered fortitude, digging through the rubble to help pull out neighbors and perfect strangers, awaiting death while standing between Hamas fighters and family members huddled in a bomb shelter, burying and mourning over children not their own, searching for words to compel their erstwhile “leaders” to suspend ideology and theology, to silence the guns in a way that is sustainable and dignified for all.
Of course we have beheld stories of profound ugliness as well, people filling guns and missiles with hate as well as with explosives, seeking to vanquish the “other” altogether under cover of “protection,” people committed to punish far more collectively than their immediate adversaries. This of course is no surprise as armed conflict is notorious for bringing out some of the worst of our human condition, the demons we tolerate and then seek to objectify, the demons which continue to control a more sizeable slice of human motivation than our faulty politics and religion would have us believe.
In addition to these stories, for people who do what I do (and for an increasing number of others as well), the violence which floods our senses is no mere abstraction. We not only know about conditions of deprivation, we know people deprived. We not only know about conditions of armed violence and its consequences, we know people whose very lives have been claimed by it. While perhaps not about family members and close friends, the conflicts, the tragedies, the disasters, these and more have a human face, a face we can both see and recognize.
I had few aspirations as a child aside from surviving childhood, but one of them was to have friends in all corners of the world. This need to make and keep the world “personal” has been the source of great heartbreak and at times anger, but also of meaning, a connection to stories, values and practices about which I still know too little, but about which I would know nothing of importance if not for friends and colleagues in places from Brazil to Cameroon and from Lebanon to the Philippines. And yes, from Israel and Palestine as well.
It is just different when the crises about which we read have echoes in our own memories, our own circles of concern, when the flesh that decays in other places has connection to our own flesh, when the breaking of the international norms which now hang by a thread affect directly those with whom we have also broken bread.
I do wish that people would take more care to ensure that their “sharing” on crises such as those unfolding in Gaza moves the needle on our common humanity rather than creating conditions and excuses for additional division. But this can be a tough sell, a tough ask, in situations where the overt violence of the moment is merely the latest movement in an endlessly long and discordant symphony. But it is important not to compound division with divisiveness, not to compound the consequences of an increasingly suspicious and abstract world by relinquishing our own connection.
One of the best stories from this week involved two friends of differing cultures who found themselves driven apart by the “sides” they had taken on Gaza. The story was in part about the division stoked by opinions that were stronger than could be supported and which erected walls which were not immediately intended to be traversed. But the real story was about the reconciliation, the “I love you” at the end of a sequence largely defined in the short-term by “I don’t understand or agree with you.”
While the wounds of conflict continue to fester, and as we live in considerable and genuine dread over the state of the world and its victims some of whose paths we have crossed, we have a responsibility to preserve as best we can a world which is personal, a world where disagreement does not inevitably lead to division, a world where dignity and healing constitute the flow-through of our commitment to each other. This is a bit naive to be sure, but I see no other way to get us across the self-inflicted abyss of violence, corruption and greed which are now swallowing up large swaths of human potential on our warming planet.
If you have other suggestions, I’m all ears.
gapwblog 