semitism.net

Here are the texts of 3 press releases you will, sadly, never see (and if you have seen such things, please send them to me):

“The [insert mainstream American Jewish religious or political organization] mourns the loss of the innocent civilians in an Israeli Defense Forces attack on the Lebanese village of Qana. Full stop.”

“The [insert mainstream Arab American or Muslim American religious or political organization] mourns the loss of the Israeli civilians killed and injured in today’s Hizballah attacks on Israel. Period.”

“The [insert organization, Jewish or not, that opposes the Occupation] condemns the suicide attack today that killed X number of Israelis and expresses its sympathies to the families of those killed. The end.”

why? why will we never see these? because we all know that, even if any of the above is said, and often they don’t even go that far to start, every one of these organizations or people, whether right, left, or center, Jewish or not, will then spend the rest of their press release, their talking points, their “FAQs,” contextualizing, minimizing, rationalizing. leaving the important messages, those that could really make people stop and think, unsaid, and saying too much about what, in the end, no one wants to hear anyway.

just stop and imagine if any of these had come out. i’m not even talking about an army doing this, just people, just organizations, on the “other side”. saying we’re sorry. usually these sentiments are put in the “it goes without saying” category.

why am i thinking about non-existent press releases and unsaid sentiments? thinking about how powerful they could be if they’d just leave everything else aside?

when i heard about the bombing and killings in qana last sunday morning, again, 10 years later, i was wracked yet again with pain, anger, heartbreak, crippling hopelessness and the anguish of paralysis, of knowing what to do or how. as the emotions flooded through me, i thought of what i could do, what i could say, what i could write that might finally shake one person within the u.s. government, the american people, the american jewish community to make it stop. to convey that this time, these kids, these families, these deaths must be the last. that finally we can see that force is not the answer because this is always what force leads to.

but then i stopped. not because i felt like i shouldn’t send that message, or that that was a message that did not need to be sent, but because i had to ask myself a question. why had i not leapt to the computer when hearing about israeli civilian casualties in the past 2 weeks, or in the past who have been victims of palestinian terrorism? why had i not done so when hearing about the murder in seattle of a woman at a jewish federation office at the hands of someone who claimed he was “angry at israel?”

did i, do i, care less about israel, about israelis, about american jews? does that explain the disparity? is that why i only seem to write when israel has done wrong?

of course not. it hurts to think that i could even be perceived this way. i write what i write and do what i do because my concern is precisely with israel and israeli civilians and the jewish community as a whole, but it is on these communities that i feel i might have an impact, and so i focus my energies there. judaism is the source of what i believe, what i try to say, and i believe it is where the answers lie.

but by leaving these things unsaid, by not writing — at all or as forcefully — when israelis are the targets, when my fellow jews are the victims, or demonstrating my sorrow when a rocket lands or a suicide bomber strikes without then spending 4 more paragraphs explaining the context of the occupation, people believe the worst about me. and they believe this about the entire left, about anyone who criticizes israeli policy, and say we are against israel. or, worse, self-hating and even anti-semitic.

and although i know it to be untrue, and am outraged when the accusations are made, i can see that it is somewhat understandable that they feel this way, and i must freely acknowledge this shortcoming, this failure to say what i may not think needs to be said, but in retrospect, most emphatically does. hopefully we who work against the occupation and now the lebanon war can all acknowledge this. and starting saying, meaning, what we always leave unsaid. our real sorrow at the loss of innocent life in israel.

and if we don’t feel that, then we need to do some even harder internal questioning. and if we do feel it, but will only show it when the other side demonstrates its sorrow at palestinian or lebanese deaths, then we do not understand what true sympathy and compassion mean.

because we must admit we say the same thing about the center and the right, the mainstream jewish organizations, when they leap up at the first israeli casualty, or follow up their expressions of sorrow at the loss of innocent palestinian life with 500 words about the need to end terrorism. what’s so different about our sorrow, about our contexts?

when those things do happen, when rockets and suicide bombers strike, i do instantly think of my friends in israel. my summers living in tel aviv and haifa. my feelings when being in jerusalem and hearing that a suicide bomber had struck nearby. but i will also admit that i often do quickly start thinking of the occupation, the palestinians who have been killed by israel in horrific attacks, the crushing poverty. that is, i do almost instantly start contextualizing those israeli deaths. and as an unintended result, slowly start minimizing them. i don’t stop at “these deaths are tragic” or “terrorism must end. period.” i continue. i say “but” and “don’t forget about…” and, to paraphrase current lingo, “the root cause is…”

and when i see the organized jewish community decry and mourn those israeli deaths so completely, so forcefully, i respond because, well, they do not use my context. they have not contextualized and minimized. they have not accepted my “root cause.” they say so many things i do not agree with about those deaths that i cannot just leave things be.

conversely, when a tragedy like qana occurs, I, we on the left, expect precisely the opposite reaction from the jewish community, who in turn, acts much like we do. i think what drove me to the computer on sunday morning was not that the bombing happened, because my ability to stop that is remote. and the loss of innocent life should speak for itself.

but that’s just it — those innocent lives didn’t speak for themselves, and what drove me to write was the contextualizing, the “buts,” the “root causes” articulated by others. the statements, the talking points went instantly from the bombing to the talk about hizballah’s original provocation, hizballah’s use of human shields, or about belief in the idf’s morality and restraint in conflict. no, i screamed to myself, these were civilians, kids, in a warzone –where were they supposed to go? why are they blaming the victims? why do they leave their sorrow, their sympathy unsaid, instead replacing it with garbage about why israel is never at fault?

just stop it, please stop it, i screamed and keep screaming now as the “qana conspiracy” theories blaze the internet. jewish morality, jewish compassion for human life is unconditional. it is not an option. are we saying 28 deaths are 50% less tragic than 57?

what i think, what i hope, we all want to hear said are simple expressions of human understanding, of human sorrow. we leave unsaid everything that humanizes, and replace it with so much of what dehumanizes.

what should israel do? what should the lebanese do? what should the palestinians do about this issue or that? does anyone really care what i think about that? in the end, i am just guessing as much as anyone else. all of the advocacy groups and organizations may have policy experts, historians, political scientists, but in the end, they’re all just talking. they may sound more coherent, make better guesses, but not much more than that.

sure, it’s important to know “the facts” or “the history” but in this situation, and most people who know a thing or two will be more than happy to let you know it, to show that maybe you need to listen to them because they knew some fact or date or acronym you didn’t. but no one — no one — knows all of the facts, all of the history of everyone and every side involved. and once your objective knowledge side is incomplete, the subjective side becomes so much more critical.

what this war is teaching me — maybe because i now have a son who has changed so much about the way i think, feel, exist — is how little anyone just stops and mourns for the other. and says — means — just that we are sorry that it happened. and we’ll leave ’til tomorrow the blame, the context, the justification. hell, we hardly even do this for ourselves sometimes.

really, iraq should have been teaching me that for the last few years, but i’ve been too distracted by arguing and contextualizing. being the mirror image of what i despise so much in the leadership of the american jewish community. maybe we all have.

and it is also teaching me that there can be real power in doing that. that maybe 9-point policy plans shouldn’t come first, but second. that we won’t rehumanize these conflicts, and thus hopefully end them, by issuing talking points and plans that can simply be shot down, have holes poked here and there, ultimately leaving no one any better off, but continuing what need not be said, and never saying what does.

sure, sounds very naive, even moreso when people are dying and i am in the security and comfort (it’s in the 80s today, after all, rather than 100s) of washington, when the situation seems to be sprialling more and more out of control with each passing day.

but i say so too does the idea that we will solve our problems and pave a way to peace with force. or that the israeli or u.s. governments, given who they currently rely on for advice and guidance, will come to any decisions substantively or morally different than they do now without some level of true input and focus from millions of people. and, no matter how correct we in the opposition may think we are, we cannot say for a minute that we have been particularly effective at organizing the kind of numbers that will be necessary to make these governments think differently.

that is also why i don’t think any current group’s “crisis report” or “policy briefing” or “emergency appeal” will mean anything ultimately in these conflicts themselves either. may make for interesting reading, but even if AIPAC’s next policy briefing shocks the policy and advocacy world and is filled with analysis that ADC or JVP agree with, so what? will that make news? will anyone in palestine hear about it?

what if, instead, AIPAC’s briefing looked like what i wrote above? just a plain and simple expression of compassion. i think people would hear about that; it would mean something.

who can do this, if the current organizations can’t? maybe the world does not need another organization, or maybe it does. maybe it’s time a group called “life from death” emerged and simply took this position of reminding everyone, on all sides, of every human life lost. reminding the policymakers and the people every day. forcing people to talk to make the killing end by not letting anyone forget the killing is happening, or that it is anything other than killing.

maybe we don’t need an organization, just a lot of people e-mailing might do it. people decrying the deaths. saying they’re sorry. waiting til the next day, or just letting someone else fill in their version of the context, what they see as the root cause. letting someone else minimize. maybe over time fewer people would want to be in those shoes of minimizing, and more in the shoes of sympathizing.

i am not talking about “dialogue,” about “putting a human face on the other,” about bridges of understanding. because all of those things go back to trying to convince someone else that your context is the right one, the better one.

no, i am talking about just saying what we leave unsaid now, and simply putting aside our own ideas, our own egos, to not say everything we think we know, but instead let things go as those sympathies might take us.

as i write this, we have just marked tisha b’av on the jewish calendar. a day that marks the destruction of the first and second temples in jerusalem and other tragedies that have befallen the jewish people. it is often said that the second temple was destroyed because of “sinat chinam,” or “baseless hatred” among the jewish people for one another.

it’s too easy to say we now see that same baseless hatred of others, to decry the jewish people for losing this lesson, or to say the jews are now the victim of baseless hatred by others.

what we have instead is baseless ambivalence to the human lives lost on the side we don’t agree with. and that is what needs to end. and that starts with our hearts, our sympathies and, most importantly, our words and actions.

this has been yet another exceedingly long message that i am sure many of you are saying is about nothing and makes me sound even sillier than i have before. but i hope everyone will think more about what we don’t say to one another, about what we think “goes without saying,” rather than read more policy updates or spend more time being convinced of the rightness of the facts you already believe.

brad brooks-rubin