An old man sits amid the destruction on what’s left of a wall and lets the tears stream from his eyes. He seems not to have the strength to dry them. Maybe he means never to dry them. A woman clutches her head, not knowing which way to turn. She has lost her children. There is no one near to help her find them. She won’t find them. I don’t know that for sure but my fears for her authorise me to say it. We are in a world emptied of good fortune, never mind God, where children aren’t found and husbands and wives don’t come back.
I turn off the television. My wife is out with friends. Alone, at my weakest, I let my own tears flow. They are a Jew’s tears but they are all I have.
And these are Gazans I am weeping for. For all I know they were dancing in these now ruined streets when pictures of butchered Israelis went around the word. For all I know they are crying today for terrorists - perhaps their own children or brothers - who didn’t make it back to boast of the number of Israelis they’d killed. And very likely they taught their children from the cradle to despise all Jews, for that was no occasional, skin-deep animosity enacted in Southern Israel last week. I am sorrowing for an old man and a distraught mother who think I am an animal and that my children are animals too.
But for the very reason that I am not an animal I can see them only as people with feelings like my own. Grief is grief. Fear is fear. What we share we should not scorn. The day after tomorrow I might feel differently. But the time we give to let pity breathe is one of the measures of being civilised. To everything a season. To everyone a time to mourn.
And the day after tomorrow, sure enough, an educated Gazan woman tries my humanity to its limits when she assures BBC’s Newsnight that Hamas only killed civilians. Soldiers, maybe. But no one else. She tells her beads, shakes her head, and closes her mind. Should we be surprised by her denial? It does, after all, beggar the imagination that men could have done what those men did.
Men? ‘Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,’ Macbeth tells the murders he has hired to kill Banquo, ‘as mongrels, spaniels, curs and demi-wolves, are clept all by the name of dogs’. Who but a demi-wolf would tear the life out of sleeping babies? Not even if those babies are Jews? Not even if they illegally occupy Palestinian land? Now there you have me.
What we don’t know about the education of a terrorist we can guess. But those in European capitals who celebrated the slaughter of Jews of all ages present a greater challenge to comprehension. How does a feminist put aside all she believes to cheer on a rapist? Is rape in one cause allowably different from rape in another? How many Lecturers in Human Rights partied through the night when shown the footage of Israelis denied their right to live?
That there was no pause even for provisional pity among the progressive supporters of Hamas in the West is scarcely less shocking than the pitiless acts themselves. Allow the fallacious narrative that Zionists dropped out of a clear blue sky to occupy someone else’s country, you would still expect some inhalation of breath, some space for shock or sorrow, some admission that when they shouted ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’ even the most fervent Anti-Zionists never envisaged freedom taking quite so bloody a form.
But no. Ere yet that blood had dried, the victims of this unimaginable horror were normalised into burglars who had broken into someone else’s house and got what they deserved. Hard cheese. If you don’t want to be cut down at a music festival, opined one scholar educated at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, ‘How about don’t have musical festivals on stolen land?’
To which I am not going to answer - if you don’t want your country reduced to rubble how about not slaughtering teenagers at a rave or babies in their beds. Just because you were dancing on my grave yesterday, I will not dance on yours today.
But here’s something that puzzles me: is not victim-blaming accounted among the worst of crimes wherever courses on Faith and Diversity, Race and Ethnicity, Feminist Philosophy etc are taught. Or is victim-blaming an academic luxury not afforded to Jews? Israelis, do I mean? I understand the distinction. The separation between Israel and Jews is fundamental to Anti-Zionist discourse. Anti-Semitic, I am again and again assured, is the last thing Anti-Zionists are. But understand that the sight of Israelis who just happen to be Jews being manhandled into cars and driven away into captivity, stirs memories of events Jews hoped never to be caught up again.
One of the elderly Israeli hostages who just happens to Jewish is a peacenik who lived in a kibbutz close to Gaza and ferried sick Gazans to hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He thought they were his friends. The experience of friends turning on you the minute a pogrom gets underway is also burnt into the minds of Jews.
‘Never again,’ the world said after the death camps were liberated. But here that ‘Never’ is once more, returned in all its crimson glory.
My father, who was not an active Zionist, maintained that as Jews would never be safe, we should look to Israel as our lifeboat. The bitter irony is that the more unsafe in Israel we feel, the more we need it. That we have to fight to the death for its survival should surprise no one. There is a much used Yiddish word, rachmones. It means pity. How not to forgo rachmones while fighting to the death to hold on to it would try the wisdom of Solomon. But trying the wisdom of Solomon is something in which Jews are well versed.
The Observer, 14.10.23
As always, Howard, you write in a way that communicates with the deepest part of ourselves. The true part. Think it’s less about pity and more about incredulous disbelief at abhorrent human behaviour. For me there are no sides, just innocents paying the price and the rest of us poisoned by the ugliness of human cruelty. Makes no difference the distance between over there and over here, we are scratched by the violence, it infects us and makes the whole world sick.
Thank you for your succinct words Mr Jacobson. I was interested to read your words about pity as I have been chewing over a passage from Philip Roth's 'Letting Go' in the last few days. It's the following:“We feel a debt, I know, hearing of the other fellow’s sorrows, but the question I want to raise here is, What good is the bleeding heart? What’s to be done with all this pitying? Look, even my mother had it, she pitied my father. Isabel Archer pitied Osmond. I pity you, you may pity me. I don’t know if it makes any of us behave better, or wiser. Terrible struggles go on in the heart, to which the heart itself will not admit, when pity is mistaken for love.”
As far the the left woke crowd go I have been asking myself what pity does for the pitier? It seems to me that psychologically speaking, it puts them on moral highground, on the side of the righteous, it gives them the opportunity to wear their ‘look how much empathy I have’ T-shirt and then go home and polish their haloes. However, in this case, pity looks more like self-righteousness and perhaps also a way to expunge the guilt of privilege.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not denying that one should try to help the poor folks in Gaza but I think that if one does truly wish to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians, one should pause the pity party and examine one’s motives. Only once they have been checked against the narcissim of self righteouness can clear-headed thought follow about how the Palestinians, and a potential peace process, might best be served.
There seems to me to be such a disconnect here. I can't fathom why the left do not seem to ask why the Palestinians have aligned themselves (Chomsky himself declared the elections free and fair) behind a party that has chosen the path of terrorism, with self-avowed genocidal intent, when there are heroic and successful examples of non-violent resistance à la Mandela or à la Gandhi that could more likely pave the way for liberation and peace?
Oy, what a pickle, where is a messiah when you need one?