WHAT IT MEANS TO BE “MORALLY EXHAUSTED”
Or holding two contrary points of view in your head at the same time….
Recently I read a NY Times review of a play, “Prayer for the French Republic”, portraying a Jewish family in Paris trying to decide if the antisemitism was sufficient to warrant moving to Israel. This was not a play about the Holocaust, though that usually figures in Jewish thinking, it was more or less contemporary. The play’s critic said being a Jew is “morally exhausting”. Though I live in the US and would neverconsider relocating to Israel, I totally get it, especially nowadays. What’s morally exhausting for Jews today is needing to hold two very different points of view in your head at the same time.
It’s impossible to read the news and watch the news reports and to not be horrified by the deaths going on in Gaza. Seeing the corpses of children lined up, hearing the laments of the people affected, witnessing the bombed out buildings, is horrific.
On the other hand, I understand why the Israeli public largely supports the war. For one thing, they’re not receiving the same coverage as we are. According to a recent New Yorker article, their coverage is limited to troop movement, deaths of IDF soldiers, etc. They only hear sketchy accounts of the misery Palestinians are experiencing.
Also, the dilemma is not simple — as some on either side would have you believe. In the past few years, there have been many missile strikes from Hamas on Israeli towns with Israeli reprisals that were followed by cease-fires — and each time Hamas has regrouped and become stronger. Plus there are the tunnels — at least 300 miles of tunnels — far more than even the Israelis imagined, built under hospitals, schools and residences. You may have heard this explanation dozens of times but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
And as Thomas Friedman has written so persuasively in his Times editorials, Gaza didn’t have to become the “prison” that’s so often depicted — Hamas, as the country’s leaders, could have used the billions and billions of dollars that funded tunnel construction, missiles and other weapons into construction of hospitals, schools, colleges, businesses, markets, infra-structure in Gaza. Israel did not prevent them from doing so — the Hamas goal has always been and will always be the destruction of Israel, not a viable Palestinian economy, much less a flourishing territory.
And yet, Israel has behaved as poorly if not more so — especially since the election of Netanyahu — that includes the unfettered, illegal growth of the settlements, the gratuitous attacks on West Bank Palestinians, and the humiliations at check-points. It’s one thing to have check-points for security reasons, but guards should show respect and compassion and many haven’t. Because Israel had the upper hand militarily, however, they haven’t had to account for their behavior. They behaved badly because they could. Or thought they could. Oct. 7 caught them up short. It showed graphically and in awful, horrendous detail how a military solution does not provide long-term security for Israel.
In past decades, they should have behaved more justly and more generously because it was the right thing to do. The question now is whether they have learned anything regarding their actions from the recent debacle. As long as Netanyahu is in charge — it seems not.
I can say first-hand that it’s very difficult to have a point of view about the current struggle. I fear it will not end well and it could end catastrophically. I hope not. I feel the Israelis have the right to their little scrap of land — but they’re going to have to learn to share — share land, share resources, share equity. And, unfortunately, taking any real step in this direction has now become much more difficult.
