Fallen angels

"Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 

     Tuesday is the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, many young people enjoying a music festival. Plus the 250 Israelis taken hostage, sparking the War in Gaza. About two dozen of those hostages are still being held.

     That the war's subsequent bloodshed has eclipsed the initial horror hardly needs to be said. Very little energy in the world was spent sympathizing with the Israeli loss. Just the opposite. The Palestinians position — that Israel should never have been created in the first place, so any attack upon any Israeli, or any Jew anywhere in the world for that matter, can be rationalized as "resistance" — dominates much of the conversation. Sophomores who won't eat meat out of sympathy for the suffering of animals unquestionably accept that.
     Many Jews, for whom the existence of Israel is woven through their religious liturgy, looked on increasingly aghast as continuing warfare caused the loss of 66,000 Palestinians, a third of them children. Israel's argument — they need to destroy Hamas, the terrorist organization that sparked and continued the war, the elected leadership of Gaza — could not compete with the jarring photographs of grieving mothers and emaciated children. It is rejected in Israel itself, which has been riven by demonstrations against the war. Being a democracy, they allow that. Gaza is not a democracy, and any ill-feeling about Hamas can be lethal to express. Israel's continuation of the war was denounced as genocide, with few observing that if that is indeed the case, it's the rare genocide where the suffering party could end the bloodshed at any time but doesn't.

     Even though I am free to comment on the situation, I generally don't. Mostly because I've expressed myself on the stalemate repeatedly through the years. The situation hardly changes — though the past two years have cranked up the bloodshed by several orders of magnitude — and my position has not changed. I'm against killing. I'm for people living in peace. I want the Palestinians to live free, unencumbered lives. I'm also for Israel, conceptually, as the world's one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of Jews living in a place, a centuries old dilemma where the Jews neighbors periodically decide, vis a vis nothing, that the solution for all their problems is for all these Jews to go live somewhere else. Even if the place they're living is where they've lived for 3,000 years. Even if the people claiming it never lived there, themselves, but believe they ought to inherit it from their displaced ancestors. Every inch of Chicago is also land that was stolen or swindled away from Native Americans. Yet if what Potawatomi remain started shooting up schoolyards, demanding it back, I doubt they'd be received so enthusiastically on campuses across the world. Though maybe I'm being overly optimistic here. 

      Public reaction to the war is an eloquent rationalization for the existence of Israel, as is the world's lip service toward the suffering of the Palestinians. Talk is cheap.
     What else? I wish Benjamin Netanyahu, a self-dealing nationalist cast in the Trump mold, had never been elected. Israelis who feel he cynically prolonged the war to cover himself politically are probably right. I don't know. But my wishes are immaterial here. 
     Attempts at peace since Israeli occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 have been chimeras, and I imagine this latest attempt will vanish in a similar fashion, just another trick of the desert heat. When the conflict eventually ends, it will will end the way all such strifes ends — when one side destroys the other or, as in Northern Ireland, when both sides tire of killing each other and mutually decide to try something different. The lack of creativity applied to this situation is astounding. The Palestinians have two tools: violence and world opinion. Their strategy seems to be to lash out at Israel, then cast Israel's reaction as inexplicable barbarism. Give them credit: it works. The world buys it. Nobody says, "Gee, if the Israeli's are such murderous barbarians, then why do you keep attacking them? Is that a good idea?" Do that, and they sound the liberation buzzer, drowning you out.

     Second, I don't write about this much because the subject is an agony to me. I was raised in the Six Day War era when Israel was bold and smart and beloved. My colleague Bill Mauldin depicted Israel as a spunky sabra soldier, David versus Goliath, threatened by enormous Arab countries. 

    The point of the column at left still holds, though the scale has changed. Just as 9/11 provoked the United States to constrain its own freedom in the name of security, so the Oct. 7 attacks engaged Israel into betraying its humanitarian core. Israel literally lost its mind. The country pull offed feats of intelligence such as the raid on Entebbe. Now they seem brutal and dumb — the exploding pager piece-de-resistance notwithstanding. That was brilliant. 

     Otherwise, that seems part of a past as distant as the United States when it was a force for good, at home and abroad, not twin giants of oligarchy and authoritarianism, supporting each other, growing in power and recklessness, to howls of approval from a mob too stupid to realize that, when laws and norms are simply cast aside, they could be next, at the tyrant's whim. And even if they aren't, the people who are being abused will be missed. As bad as ICE seems now to Americans who think and feel, it'll feel worse when the strawberries are rotting in the fields. Even the Germans eventually had reasons to regret banishing all those Jewish physicists, who happily developed the atomic bomb for the Americans.

     You can support a country without approving what it is doing right now — every Democrat knows that. Love of what America represents, what it has been and might yet be again, is only strengthened seeing how easily millions would trash it all for nothing. Love of what Israel represents — a safe homeland for Jews, one that has a quarter of its population non-Jews, living in peace, generally. That said, Israel has similarly gone down a dark path — Netanyahu left the door open for the Oct. 7 attacks, and his rage against the Palestinians that Hamas hides behind is neither smart nor will it be effective, except for perhaps, finally, pushing all involved to push for a solution which, now that I say it, strikes me as the most extreme optimism.

     Sunday's blog post was about mourning my mother and my cousin, and I've already strayed too far into politics — I'm doing it here because I have no Monday column in the paper, having chosen to interview the new Israeli consul general to the Midwest, slated to run in the Sun-Times Tuesday, on the anniversary. The war is such baffling folly, to me, that I wanted to hear an Israeli official try to explain it. I hope you'll read that in the paper tomorrow. 

    Until then, I just want to draw attention to all the lives lost, on both side. I had a niece in Israel Oct. 7, a bright young rabbi little different from those slain. I see her, I think of them.

    And when I'm holding my new granddaughter, and she cries because she's hungry, I extend my hand for a bottle and someone quickly hands one to me. Even a few seconds are frustrating. But during that wait, it often occurs to me how horrible it would be to be holding a baby in some Gazan ruin with no bottle to give her and none coming. I don't see how anyone of any stripe can accept that. When I was talking to the consul general last week, I pointed out that the situation in Gaza was the sort of disaster that Israelis used to pride themselves in leaping to help fix, publicizing the teams they rush in to respond to every earthquake and tsunami, all over the world. Yet this one is done by them for purposes which they insist are rational.

     I don't like politics because it isn't real. You can't hold politics, or touch it. It's important, but notional. People are real. They can suffer, and be lost, and be missed, and grieved. We need to focus more on that, and the politics will unravel themselves. 

     The bas relief above is "Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia. Crafted of glazed terra cotta about 1475, in 2008 it inexplicably fell from the wall above a doorway at 
Metropolitan Museum of Art and shattered on the stone floor. It took years to meticulously reconstruct the artwork and return it to public view, in 2016.
     The consul general mentioned a Jewish value, tikun olam, repairing the world. Not everything can be fixed — the dead stay dead, the traumatized might never heal, the past can be hidden, or distorted, but never altered. Yet fixing the world today, despite the horror and loss, is always an option. Working to make something better than this. It's hard work, far harder than blame and condemnation. But not impossible, unless you never even start. I truly believe there has been enough breaking stuff. It's long past time to start trying to fix things.