I. Looking for Resistance

I posted a note on my Facebook profile of a list of Israel and Jewish voices opposing Israel’s attacks on Gaza (Word Doc). It begins, “Contrary to what popular media in North America claims, there are critical voices in Israel and among American Jews.” Though I put it up, I paused before writing that sentence, particularly the bit about American Jews, because of how uncomfortable I feel when people write carelessly about resistance movements among Muslims. I wondered if I was being just as condescending as others are when they take Muslim activists out of context in order to use their comments to bolster their own self-righteousness. In asking that American Jews denounce Israel’s indiscriminate violence, I was assuming that by and large American Jews do support Israel’s policies, while simultaneously attempting to dispel that same myth. In attempting to shatter the media’s misleading portrayal of a supposedly hegemonic Jewish/Israeli block that supports Ehud Barak’s war crimes, was I being paternalistic? I have no qualms demanding Israelis acknowledge the immorality of the violence, but can I demand the same from American Jews without coming across as reductive?

Ultimately, the links I put up are ones that need to be read, since the papers I read are doing a troublingly good job of not giving them publicity. I wish, though, that I could word it in a way that more carefully distanced American Jewry from Israeli policy, in the way that I demand people understand the distance between Muslims and Al Qaeda. I don’t do official “condemnations” of terror, because it infuriates me that anyone would expect to have supported the killings of civilians in the first place. Likewise, American Jews live existences independent of Israel; I can’t therefore expect them to forever be policing Israel.

On writing about America’s progressive Jewry, Steve Ackerman notes:

You don’t want to reduce yourself to the mere fact of your heritage and become a self-parody. You have other stuff to write about and pay attention to. You don’t want to hurt your mother’s feelings.

I can relate to that.

II. Looking

Though the war’s been going on for a few days now and though hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and many hundreds more injured, I’ve yet to watch a single video of the violence or look at any photographs. It’s not, of course, for a lack of first-person reports from Gaza (though Israel has forbidden journalists from entering Gaza), but it’s that I’m avoiding the images, as I tend to do. So though on a theoretical and rational level, I’m horrified at the violence, on a more private level, I’m untouched. This whole thing feels unreal, something like a story whose end I already know. Something artificial. And perhaps because I have no loved ones in or from Palestine, I’m afforded the luxury of this emotional distance. But it was like this after the tsunami, too, and still when the violence flares (and continues to worsen) in Sri Lanka.

There is a massacre happening right now in the Congo, which I’ve mostly not been paying attention to. The other day, I saw a photograph in the newspaper of a twelve-year-old boy carrying an toddler on his back. It was a technically beautiful shot, the colour of their skin and the colour of the sky in perfect contrast to each other. The caption noted that they were looking for their parents. Two black kids in Africa, crying. Stock photo material.

But something hurt just then, a visceral hurt, something that had nothing to do with the war, just the way they were crying — you could tell that they’d only recently gotten lost, that they thought their parents were still alive somewhere, that they were crying the way kids do the world over, like if you cry someone you love will fix this. It was something about the way he was holding his little brother, the way you protect the ones you love, something about all the different kinds of fear in the world, something about family and loneliness.

Maybe if that picture had been taken a few days later, when their pain had grown less acute, had given way to despair, I wouldn’t have flung the paper away. As it is, I stil haven’t read about the violence in the Congo — a selfish luxury I can enjoy that no one deserves.

I’m afraid of pictures.