By Gal Beckerman
Thursday, October 12, 2023
“Did they really decapitate babies?” my 14-year-old
daughter asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a text message on her phone
from a friend. “They’re saying they found Jewish babies killed, some burnt,
some decapitated.” And I froze. Not because I didn’t know what to say—though in
truth I didn’t know what to say—but because for a moment I forgot what century
I was in. All of the assumptions I had made as a Jewish father, even one who
had grown up, as I did, with the Holocaust just a few decades past, were
suddenly no longer relevant. Had I adequately prepared her for the reality of
Jewish death, what every shtetl child for centuries would have known
intimately? Later in the day, she asked if, for safety’s sake, she should take
off the necklace she loves that her grandparents had given her and that has her
name written out in Hebrew script.
The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians last Saturday
broke something in me. I had always resisted victimhood. It felt abhorrent,
self-pitying to me in a world that seemed far away from the Inquisition and
Babi Yar—especially in the United States, where I live and where polls
repeatedly tell me that Jews are
more beloved than any other religious group. I wasn’t blind to
anti-Semitism and the ways it had recently become deadlier, or to the
existential dread that my family in Israel felt every time terrorists blew up a
bus or café—it’s a story whose sorrows have punctuated my entire life. But I
refused to embrace that ironically comforting mantra, “They will always want to
kill us.” I hated what this tacitly expressed, that if they always
want to kill us, then we owe them, the world, nothing. I deplore the occupation
for both the misery it has inflicted on generations of Palestinians and the way
it corrodes Israeli society; when settlers in the West Bank have been attacked,
it has pained me, but I have also felt anger that they are even there. In
short, I wasn’t locked into the worldview of my survivor grandparents and I
felt superior for it.
But something in me did break. As I was driving on
Tuesday, I heard a long interview on
the BBC with Shir Golan, a 22-year-old woman who had survived the attack at the
music festival where more than 250 people were killed, her voice sounding just
like one of my young Israeli cousins. She described, barely able to catch her
breath, how the shooting had started and how she’d begun to run. She’d found a
wooded area and tried to hide. “I got really into the ground,” she said. “I put
the bushes on me.” Covered with dirt and leaves, she’d waited. A group of
terrorists had shown up and called for anyone hiding to come out. From her spot
under the earth, she’d seen three young people, whom she called “children,”
emerge. “I didn’t go out because I was scared. But there were three children
next to me who got out. And then they shot them. One after one after one. And
they fell down, and that I saw. I saw the children fall down. And all that I
did was pray. I prayed to my god to save me.”
I pulled my car over because my own hands were shaking as
I listened. She then described waiting, hidden in the dirt under bushes for
hours, until she saw the terrorists begin to light the forest on fire. “I
didn’t know what to do. Because if I’m staying there, I’m just burnt to death.
But if I go out they are going to kill me.” She crawled over to where she saw
dead bodies and lay on top of them, but the heat soon approached, so she found
more bushes to hide in until she could run again. Burnt bodies were everywhere,
and Shir looked for her friends but couldn’t find them, couldn’t even see the
faces of those killed because they were so badly burned. “I felt like I was in
hell.” She finally escaped in a car.
Her story flung me back to my grandparents’ stories. My
grandmother hid in a hole for a year in the Polish countryside, also under
dirt, also scared. My grandfather spent months in Majdanek, a death camp, and
saw bodies pile up in exactly this way. Stories are still emerging of families
burnt alive, of children forced to watch their parents killed before their
eyes, of bodies desecrated. How was this taking place last Saturday?
But these stories aren’t what broke me. What did was the
distance between what was happening in my head and what was happening outside
of it. The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering,
whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur. They are supposed
to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is
first a child in distress regardless of country or background. But I quickly
saw that many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me
could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized
and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian—templates made of
concrete. The break was caused by this enormous disconnect. I was in a world of
Jewish suffering that they couldn’t see because Jewish suffering simply didn’t
fit anywhere for them.
The callousness was expressed in so many ways. There were
those tweets that
did not hide their disregard for Jewish life—“what did y’all think
decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers”—or the one that described the
rampage as a “glorious thing to wake up to.” There was the statement by
more than two dozen Harvard student groups asserting, in those first hours in
which we saw children and women and old people massacred, that “the Israeli
regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” And then there
were the less explicit posts that nevertheless made clear through
pseudo-intellectual word salads that
Israel got what it deserved: “a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward
ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these
things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia.” I hate to
extrapolate from social media—it is a place that twists every utterance into a
performance for others. But I also felt this callousness in the real world, in
a Times
Square celebratory protest promoted by the New York City chapter of
the Democratic Socialists of America, at which one speaker talked of supporting
Palestinians using “any means necessary” to retake the land “from the river to
the sea,” as a number of placards declared. There were silences as
well. Institutions that had rushed to condemn the murder of George Floyd or
Russia for attacking Ukraine were apparently confounded. I watched my phone to
see whether friends would write to find out if my family was okay—and a few
did, with genuine and thoughtful concern, but many did not.
I’m still trying to understand this feeling of
abandonment. Is my own naivete to blame? Did I tip too far over into the side
of universalism and forget the particularistic concerns to which I should have
been attuned—the precarious state of my own tribe? Even as I write this, I
don’t really want to believe that that’s true. If I can fault myself clearly
for something, though, it’s not recognizing that the same ideological hardening
I’d seen on the right in the past few years, the blind allegiances and contorted
narratives even when reality was staring people in the face, has also happened,
to a greater degree than I’d imagined, on the left, among the people whom I
think of as my own. They couldn’t recognize a moral abomination when it was
staring them in the face. They were so set in their categories that they
couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult
that claimed to speak in that people’s name. And they couldn’t acknowledge
hundreds and hundreds of senseless deaths because the people who were killed
were Israelis and therefore the enemy.
As the days go on, the horrific details of what happened—those
babies—seem to be registering more fully, if not on the ideological left,
then at least among sensible liberals. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling of
aloneness. Does it take murdered babies for you to recognize our
humanity? I find myself thinking—a thought that feels alien to my own
mind but also like the truth. Perhaps this is the Jewish condition, bracketed
off for many decades and finally pulling me in
When news broke of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 that took
49 lives (compare that with the 1,200 we now know were killed on Saturday), it
caused a sensation throughout the world. “Babes were literally torn to pieces
by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob,” The New York Times reported.
“The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the
streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape
fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.” In response
to that massacre, the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European
Jews to the United States began in earnest; the call of Zionism as a solution
also sounded clearly and widely for the first time.
In his famous poem about
the massacre, “In the City of Slaughter,” the Hebrew writer Haim Naḥman Bialik
lamented, even more than the death, the sense of helplessness (“The open mouths
of such wounds, that no mending / Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal”), the
men who watched in terror from their hiding places while women were raped and
blood was spilled. I can’t say I know what will happen now that this
helplessness has returned—if I’m honest, I also fear that Israel’s retaliation
will go too far, that acting out of a place of victimhood, as right as it may
feel, will cause the country to lose its mind. Innocent lives in Gaza have been
and will be destroyed as a result, and competing victimhood is obviously not
the way out of the conflict; it’s the reason that it is hopelessly stuck. But
in this moment, before the destruction of Gaza grabs my attention and concern
alongside fear for my relatives who have been called up to the army, I don’t
want to forget how alone I felt as a Jew these past few days. I have a
persistent, uncomfortable need now to have my people’s suffering be felt and
seen. Otherwise, history is just an endless repetition. And that’s an
additional tragedy that seems too much to bear.
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