Once violence flares up, we’ve already lost – all we can do is survive.
While there certainly is a time to identify, and hold accountable, the institutions and their ‘entrepreneurs’ who are sparking and stoking the flames of hate to protect or proliferate their own material and political interests (looking at you, Bibi, Abbas, Haniyeh, Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing), this is not it. Once direct violence is initiated, we’ve already lost the immediate battle to prevent it.
I want to be very clear here, I am speaking as an Israeli Jew, to other Israeli Jews. I am speaking as a part of and to the dreams of our people for millennia, actualizing in ways we cherish and ways we disdain. I speak with a desperate love for the land and all we seek to rebuild anew. That being said, I am in no way attempting to prescribe any form of action or restraint to Palestinians, whose unique pain and situation I cannot speak to, nor pretend to understand and therefore advise.
There is no conversation to be had, there is no convincing one surrounded by blood and broken bones. Once that first family is shattered, once the war machine is kicked into high-gear, there is no more prevention – only mitigation. That argument you’re having on social media isn’t helping anyone. This post, in its own way, isn’t helping anyone. It won’t stop the rockets from launching, it won’t stop the bombs from falling. It won’t save families from being ripped from their homes in Sheik Jarrah. These blows have started to land, and they won’t stop until this latest cycle comes to a close. This mess won’t end the occupation, and it won’t bring us any closer to liberation.
For now, all we can do is survive, survive, and bring others with us. Donate blood, volunteer medically if you have the training. Lend your body to a protest or demonstration. Seek out and give to food or monetary relief initiatives. LISTEN to those experiencing oppression at our hands and the hands of our state. Recognize how we act out of deep trauma and know that what has been done to us does not have to make us who we are. Hold space for those mourning. Meet fury with patience and strength.
But know that every individual effort we make in this period will not prevent the next. This violence, and the messages of hate on ethnic lines surrounding it, are symptoms of broader systemic failings and contradictions. The conflict is not a result of some deep, unavoidable tension; the ridiculous myth that “Jews and Arabs are eternal enemies” is just another particularly useful lie in justifying and reinforcing oppressive systems of extraction and their institutional machineries. The real fight continues when this wave ends.
And so we need to remember that this war, or conflict, or outbreak of ethnic violence, whatever you want to call it, is not just directed against our bodies but directed against our souls.
The institutions that produced it want us to get tired, so exhausted that when the violence simmers down we will simply fall asleep. It wants us to dream that, because a few hundred people were killed and the sirens are no longer ringing through the valleys, the violence has ended. To dream in luxury, to dream of clean hands. But I am begging us to stay conscious. We must see and confront the damage upon our bodies, souls, and broader society. We must recognize our responsibility, ours and ours alone, in resolving the contradictions between our minds, hearts, and actions which produce violence – no matter how painful that realization may be. Resilience induces vigilance, exhaustion bears with it the drive to push forward.
I beg HaShem for peace, but there is no peace without justice.
