Last weekend, my family and I decided, at pretty much the last minute, to go to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. It’s about a 45-minute ride in our car from where we live just outside DC, and we took one of the nation’s major highways to get there. We had to get some gas, of course. The Aquarium, if you have never been there, is a magical place. Incredible displays, almost incomprehensible dolphin show (you should have seen my 22-month-old exulting at a dolphin flying through the air, while also trying to understand how it was possible), and thousands of visitors from all over the country come every day. Pretty normal day for a very lucky, very privileged family in the United States in 2006.
In a few weeks, we’ll be commemorating the 5th anniversary of September 11. Everything here was supposed to change after that day; trips like the one we took were not supposed to be routine anymore. We had supposedly lost our innocence.
And maybe we all do stop and think every once in awhile, about the fact that we could be in danger at any moment at the hands of people we do not really understand, for reasons that we do not really, as a nation, comprehend. The immediacy of the danger, the ferocity of the people behind it, the solutions at our disposal –they are all different than any we have faced before.
And obviously everythng did change for the families and friends of the thousands killed in New York, DC, and Pennsylvania. And it did change for much of the Muslim community in the US, which faced some immediate retaliatory discrimination and violence and, still today, has to take a bit more caution.
But how much has really changed for the rest of us, for the “average” American? How many of us choose not to take trips like the one my family and I took last week, or even modify them in any way from what they would have looked like in August 2001 (other than because gas is $3+ a gallon) because of 9/11-related, terrorism-based danger? What is truly different about our routines?
Any differences that compare, say, to the differences in routine imposed on the citizens of Iraq? Or Afghanistan? How much have we sacrificed, compared to what we have asked — not asked, forced — families in those societies to sacrifice for us, for our way of life, for what we did, and still do, take for granted? (We may say we did it for them, but in neither case did the average citizen ask us for anything, let alone what they got.)
Even before we set out for Baltimore, this thought came to my mind last Sunday morning when I heard Linda Gradstein on NPR, interviewing Israelis in Jerusalem about the then-just-proposed UN resolution to deal with the crisis in Lebanon. The reactions were as you might expect. Hostile, suspicious, disappointed. Quotes like “We need to finish the job.” “We need to hit them harder and harder.” “We need to stop worrying about their civilians more than our soldiers, more than our people, and just do what needs to be done.”
Who and where were these people interviewed? People huddled in bombshelters? Northerners taking refuge in strangers’ houses in the center or south of Israel? Mourners at funerals for the innocent civilians killed by Hizballah?
No. They were enjoying an afternoon in a modern, indoor, air conditioned shopping mall. At least one was a parent who had brought her children to see a puppetshow there.
And it hit me. We now live in a world — the US, Israel, much of the Arab world — of food court generals. People very willing to talk tough about imposing pain, violence, even occupation and complete destruction on others in order to insure their safety, to vindicate their beliefs, to make sure they can continue to go back to the shopping mall, the food court, with peace of mind.
These were Israelis, though. Clearly many Israelis suffered during the war — soldiers and innocent civilians killed, hundreds of thousands displaced. But, when the talk comes from people at a shopping mall, I ask whether that really matters? Remember the interviews the media did in the U.S. before we invaded Iraq? “We need to get those weapons before they get us.” “We need to stop that madman.” “Our way of life could be threatened again, like it was on 9/11.” Many of these interviews were done in New York and DC, where people had suffered on 9/11 — did that make their opinions somehow more legitimate? (Of course, Iraq was not connected to 9/11, but that didn’t matter much here then — just as, for that matter, most Lebanese are not connected with Hizballah).
So too in Damascus and elsewhere throughout the rest of the world. It was reported in late July that Nasrallah t-shirts were selling out in many places, hundreds sold each day. People like an educated opthamologist, a mother of 3, saying “I want Hezbollah to inflict the greatest possible losses” on Israel. Syria may have been (may still be) in some danger of Israeli attack, but these sentiments, these t-shirts were not about holding off those attacks. It was about Hizballah “finishing the job.” Finishing Israel, impossible as that may be.
The problem is that we in the food courts do not know what “the job” even is, let alone what it takes to do it. Some Americans, many in the Arab world, and most Israelis have personally served in the military. More have some knowledge of military experience when you count families and friends. But, nevertheless, Israelis, as a society, do not fundamentally understand what day to day life is like in Gaza or the West Bank. Or now in Lebanon. Just like Americans have absolutely no conception of what it takes to get through a day in Iraq or Afganistan. I certainly don’t.
When young Israeli soldiers who had just completed their compulsory service put up the “Breaking the Silence” photo exhibition about conditions in Hebron in 2004, about what Israeli soldiers do to Palestinians in Hebron, most Israelis were stunned. Both that soldiers had put these photos on display, but also at the pictures they saw. At the horror of occupied life. Soon some will be seen of life in southern Lebanon. Americans, too, recoiled at the Abu Ghraib photos, at the story of Haditha.
But they were only pictures in a gallery. Just like the pictures Americans have seen of the destruction in Iraq. They are pictures, film footage, 90 second news stories. When we have finished looking at them, we go back to our lives, back to the food court. As quickly as we can.
In yesterday’s Haaretz, there is an article called “Reservists: Why should we volunteer to be cannon fodder?” It contained a quote that might appear in a US paper from a soldier in Iraq (and one can only wonder why we have not heard more of this from US soldiers):
“It’s not that I’m against the war, but our commanders can’t say what the missions are and what they want from us,” says Moshe from Petah Tikva, married and father of two. “It’s clear to us that this is a war for our home,” says his comrade, “but if the government isn’t certain, why should we volunteer to be cannon fodder for their experiments.”
These are the opinions we need to be considering, we food court generals. The soldiers and the people on the other side — they at least know what “the job” really means. Our political leaders, our fellow generals in the food court, our media all have no idea.
No one in southern Lebanon or Gaza City or Kiryat Shmona or Hebron or Baghdad or Kandahar went to see a puppet show in a mall or to an aquarium last weekend. But the Israelis interviewed on NPR did. And I took my family to the Aquarium. And I am sure, if I had asked, nearly every other person there with us (except the family where the dad was wearing a “Free Palestine” t-shirt) would have echoed what the food court generals in Jerusalem said. Keep bombing. Send on our cannon fodder. Finish the job. Protect our way of life. Which is why so much of America, and even more of the American Jewish community, supports what Israel did. Because we have to — we did and said the same things with Iraq.
Many Americans suffered on 9/11, suffer to this day. But that the American public remains generally unaware of and unaffected by the suffering elsewhere means that we remain comfortable as food court generals. Saying from our place of comfort that we need to keep on fighting until we have finished the job in Iraq. And because we remain generally unaffected, we do not take to the streets to make it stop and do very little to try to learn about what finishing the job will actually mean. And so we contribute to, even support, the suffering of others.
Even if it turns out some day that the war in Iraq was the right thing to do, does spark a true “new Middle East,” our callousness, our ambivalence toward the suffering there will — or should — haunt all of us food court generals for generations. And we in the American Jewish community will be haunted even more. Because the Hizballah rockets did not rain down on us, they did not change our way of life, forced not a single one of us to seek shelter elsewhere. And yet we yelled “finish the job” even louder, lobbied our government even harder. Food court generals working on multiple fronts.
I am lucky enough to call a friend someone who is not a food court general. He and his wife do not sit back in the food courts; they go the crises, they organize, they document, they investigate, they seek to understand and ultimately to help. They are field generals. Not surprisingly, they headed to Beirut soon after the Israeli bombing began. Last weekend they, along with numerous Lebanese civil society leaders, tried to head south from Beirut with supplies. After being warned not to do so because of the danger posed by Israeli shelling, he responded:
it is not for israel to give a green light for what lebanese do in lebanon. that logic is utterly unacceptable. yes, it was indeed a big risk to do our action today, but we did everything we could do to minimize that risk…and ultimately it was not so much a risk as much as it was a choice - a choice by israel, to
bomb or not bomb. that is not a risk. that is a choice. it is too bad that people who hold positions of power and responsibility for the deployment of bombs, missiles, etc. do not understand that basic point.
I may not always agree with what he and his wife say, but I can never argue with their speaking because they have more right to than just about anyone else. They have seen, they understand, they have done something. They know what “finishing the job” will really mean, will really cost, and they have tried to hold up a mirror and show us.
My only slight correction to what he said above is that, it is not just “people who hold positions of power” who need to understand the choice involved in bombing. True, they do, but it is all of us at home, all of us in the food courts who need to understand. Because the only choice we understand now is whether to eat at McDonald’s or Subway.
Brad
I hope readers are rediscovering semitism.net and reading your fine blogs. I’ll do my best to promote it!
Meanwhile…this entry reminded me of a talk I heard about a year and a half ago, at our synagogue, by a rabbi from the Israel-based group, Rabbis for Human Rights. (It was not Arik Ascherman — it was a different rabbi and I forget his name). In any case, he kept stressing the hardships the Israelis suffered because of the suicide bombings. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he assumed he was facing an audience that would be hostile, or at least very resistant, to his message, unless he came across as clearly identified with, and sympathetic to, Israel. If he had talked about those Israelis who had lost parents, children, siblings and friends in the bombings, I would not have taken umbrage. Unfortunately, the “terrible” hardships he described involved his teenage daughter and her friends, who could no longer go to cafes in Tel Aviv whenever they wished, or friends and family who had to curtail their mall shopping, or were afraid to go to the movies. I had just returned from a visit to the West Bank where I’d seen elderly people, mothers with young children, and tired people returning from work standing at checkpoints and waiting in the heat and dust for sometimes up to an hour. I’d heard stories from a doctor in Nablus about having his home entered forcibly by IDF soldiers, while his young children cowered in a corner. Etc. etc. etc. — the point being, that it was awfully hard to work up much sympathy for people whose hardships consisted of not being able to go to a cafe or the mall whenever they felt like it.
Unfortunately, even those whose suffering is “legitimate” learn all too often from their experiences to call even more loudly for revenge. What a world we live in!