Before dawn this morning, I rose with my younger daughter, who yesterday turned two. We padded quietly into the living room to play with the bright-colored balloons we’d blown up in celebration the day before. Bounce, bounce, bounce, she chanted gleefully as she batted and chased a pink balloon around the dining room table. I thought of the thousands of children in Gaza who will now not turn two, or three, or seven, or twelve. The ones whose parents go to sleep and wonder, while they are sleeping, if they are dead. My brain is haunted, too, by the image of the four-year-old Israeli girl whose parents were murdered in front of her, and was then held in captivity by Hamas for almost two months before being released ten days ago.
Chanukah, the celebration of light, begins this evening.
I’m of a generation of American Jews whom you might think of as transitional. Some of our grandparents fought in the Second World War. Others were interned in concentration camps. And there were those, like my grandmother, who fled Nazi Germany while they still could. We, the grandchildren, touched the testament in their wrinkled flesh. Some told stories of what it was like; others did not. But even as we were connected to this darkest hour of history, the trauma became more remote. And this, I think, is a good thing. For to live, perpetually, in a state of victimhood can be paralyzing.
That trauma is even more remote for the younger generation. Their grandparents were mostly born here. Their connection to the horrors of the Holocaust, to Russian pogroms, to casual and state-sanctioned antisemitism in fin-de-siècle Europe, is largely abstract. Whatever they may have learned in Hebrew school about the existential need for a Jewish state in the face of the eternal threat of antisemitism is undercut by their having come of age at a time when, to most observers, Israel has hardened into the role of powerful occupier, normalizing relations with neighboring Arab states while making the possibility of Palestinian freedom seem ever more remote. It is this generation that is courageously leading a new Jewish movement for Palestinian liberation, and against the war in Gaza.
My grandmother never spoke of her childhood in Magdeburg, Germany, not even when, in 1994, she traveled as my chaperone to Ludwigshafen, where I sang in a production of Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’ Street Scene. As a thirteen-year-old, I did not understand the magnitude of this journey: she hadn’t been to Germany since her family fled in 1939, when she was seventeen. But she did, toward the end of her life, translate her adolescent diaries into English, hunting and pecking on a candy-colored iMac in the dappled light of her living room in the leafy, semi-assisted living facility in Sonoma County, California, where she died in 2010.
It was from these diaries that I learned that her father, my great-grandfather, was arrested just after Kristallnacht, and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he was released two weeks later thanks to a stroke of good luck and a well-placed check.1 I have written a good deal of music that touches on that part of my family history, and it is precisely that history—the story of my family, like so many who were made unwelcome in their own communities, uprooted, forced to flee on hulking steamships for new countries where they did not speak the language, while their less fortunate relatives were systematically murdered—that makes Israel’s slide into violent, fascist, Jewish supremacy all the more painful.
The savagery of the IDF’s reign of terror in Gaza is tragic, yes, because the oppressed have become the oppressor. But also tragic is the fact that many progressive Jews, myself among them, have not spoken out as forcefully against the savagery of Hamas’ massacre on 10/7 as we have against the IDF, because we fear being branded as apologists for Israel, even if that is hardly our intention. But that is the discursive reality we are living in.
How tragic that we live in a world of zero-sum moral calculus, where to mention the mutilation and rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters is presumed by some to be a justification for the IDF’s morally untenable bombing of Gaza, rather than an accounting of another atrocity. How tragic that Israelis, who have lived with the threat of suicide bombings for most of their lives, have become inured not only to the scale of human loss among Palestinians in Gaza, but to the immorality and illegality of the occupation. How tragic that we cannot have honest conversations about the vexed interplay of occupation and armed resistance: both to acknowledge that armed resistance has its own moral code, and that one can believe in the righteousness of armed resistance as a last resort, while still being appalled by the torture and murder of civilians by Hamas on 10/7, a register of violence and depravity that cannot possibly be justified.2
How tragic that for some, the full-throated fight for Palestinian liberation has meant ignoring not only Hamas' brutally repressive project, but also that its ideological commitment to the destruction of Israel makes a future peace process impossible so long as they (and the current Israeli government) are at the negotiating table. Perhaps more to the point, how tragic that in our righteous anger over decades-long oppression, abuse, and dispossession of Palestinians, some cannot acknowledge that the goals of the Hamas charter, if achieved, would merely replace Jewish supremacy in the region with Islamist supremacy. If one opposes ethnostates (and I do), one must oppose all ethnostates.
How tragic that we are mired in endless conversations about the meaning of words like Zionism, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, colonialism, terrorism, and liberalism, which seem to do little more than land us in semantic whirlpools that mystify the most urgent ethical questions: how do you fight to end a brutal occupation and apartheid system when the current Israeli government is committed to the expansion of those very instruments of oppression? How do you nurture real Palestinian leadership after a decade of cynical, tactical Israeli support for Hamas, intended to undermine Palestinian self-determination? How do you achieve a real and lasting peace when Israeli citizens are singing along to a new hit song that glorifies war, and Hamas’ popularity in Gaza has skyrocketed? When will we learn that extremism begets extremism, that violence begets violence?
There are fourteen million people living on a tiny parcel of land in the desert. Short of World War III, they’re going to be there when the war ends. These isms, far from helping us to achieve practical solutions, too often have the effect of burying us deeper in an intractable binary of sworn, permanent enemies. Meanwhile, our moral compass requires neither isms nor flags to do its work. Aided only by a steadfast commitment to human decency, we can be sure that ethnostates and democracy are incompatible, that the bombing of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank must end, and that Hamas’ massacre on 10/7 was indefensible. We need not pit the one against the other. As Edward Said wrote in the preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, “The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial.”
The status quo of suppression and denial has clearly not worked for Israel. The intelligence failures leading up to October 7th are so extreme as to encourage conspiratorial thinking. An occupation cannot be “managed" indefinitely. Meanwhile, the horror of Hamas’ massacre, intended to provoke a massive military response by Israel, has awakened many to the plight of Palestinians. I don’t believe that this awakening can be undone, and that is a good thing. Unfortunately, Hamas is now three times as popular in Gaza as it was on October 6th. I don’t know what is to be done to reverse that. Netanyahu must go, and Hamas must go. But if and when these two nihilistic and self-serving forces are no longer in the picture, perhaps then a path to a lasting peace—with universal human rights for all—might take shape.
In the meantime, my advice is to think about this crisis within a humanistic framework. Set aside isms, and do what you can to support the rights of all people. As always, I am inspired by the work of Standing Together, an alliance of Palestinian and Israeli activists who are modeling peaceful coexistence. It is a marginal movement right now, but one rooted in an ethic of love, and the understanding that peace and security for one requires peace and security for all.
When Hanukkah begins tonight, I will think of the light not as a symbol of ancient military might, but as a flicker of hope for a kinder, more loving, and more peaceful world.
Even after losing his job as a banker due to Nazi limitations on Jewish employment, the family still had resources. Class is not to be overlooked in accounting for who survived the Shoah.
I recently read Patrick Radden Keefe’s electrifying Say Nothing, an account of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and a book that offers an excellent overview of the internal disagreements within the IRA over what kind of violence was justified by “the cause.” I found it a tremendously edifying analog to the current situation in Israel/Palestine, deepening my understanding of the uses and limitations of armed resistance, and its relationship to diplomacy.
Very thoughtful, well written, and illustrates the stumbling block that bias, applied to either side of the discussion, becomes an anchor holding one to a false sense of moral righteousness, and in the case of those in power, the inability to take ownership of institutional responsibility in perpetuating the human toll and suffering we are seeing played out in Palestine today. While Gabriel’s bias is clear regarding his view of Israel as an occupier and an apartheid state, it also treats Hamas gently for the brutality it has inflicted on Palestinian arabs, Israel, and the world at large. Terrorism that for years has included hijackings, the slaughters in Munich, Rome, and the west, and using Arab children as suicide bombers. Hamas and other terrorist factions are not freedom fighters, but brutal terrorists who prey on their own. Not mentioned is it is not only Israel that blockades Gaza, but Egypt and Jordan, who are complicit along with the collective Arab states in tolerating Hamas’s actions, and keeping citizens in Gaza stateless.
There is an undeniable truth that cannot be ignored; Israel since 1948, even in considering it's mistakes, has been grounded in it’s right to exist. Hamas on the other hand has shown it's willingness to embrace any atrocity and to pay any price to achieve the opposite-- the destruction of the nation of Israel, and the death of every jewish citizen they can kill.
While I hold differing opinions surrounding the historical context that underlies the situation in Palestine and Gaza, (https://donstevens.substack.com/p/palestine-why-history-and-context), I appreciate Mr. Kahane’s writing which clearly exposes the capacity of evil that lies within each of us collectively and individually.
The history of Palestine can be explained differently depending on one's bias, but It cannot be undone. The truth is that there is innocent blood flowing in the Jordan that comes from both sides of the conflict.
It is time to cut the anchor of perceived moral superiority that holds Palestine in conflict. Edward Said was quoted, “The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence and not further suppression and denial.” He is right.
Superbly written and thank you for recognizing and articulating the constant - if frequently frustrating - nuance in this (and most) power struggles; the wholesale devaluation of which is destroying the ability for virtually any constructive collaboration to thrive or really even exist w/out instant criticism and/or cancellation.
As you point out.
It is of course natural to want to ‘take a side’, particularly for the weak & oppressed, - nothing more old school American than that - but other than the non-controversial position of siding w/murdered innocents - which every human being I know does - this centuries old, heartbreaking inability to coexist seems near impossible to reduce to slogans, -isms and, sadly, solutions. I wish it weren’t so and, as usual, violence seems to never create anything but misery, confusion and more violence.