October 7/January 7

 The other day in London, near the hotel where I've been staying the last two weeks, I passed by a small demonstration in front of a Quaker meeting house. I had only to glimpse one word on their signs—"Ceasefire"—to know what it was about. I hurried by with my head down, feeling the same nauseous twist of indignation and disgust that I have experienced in the vicinity of every similar demonstration these past four months. "What?"—I wanted to say to them—"So Israel is just supposed to accept the periodic mass murder of their own citizens? They aren't supposed to lift a finger to fight back?" 

I was reminded all over again that I am not a pacifist. Because pacifism seems to have no good answer—pretend as it might to the contrary—to the question of what people are supposed to do when "turning the other cheek" will simply mean getting massacred. At least Gandhi was honest on this point. As Orwell reminds us, when the pacifist sage was asked how the Jews might have applied his principles in the face of the Holocaust—Gandhi replied (in Orwell's paraphrase) that "the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide," so as to "arouse the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence."

I do not believe human nature is such that simply submitting to violence in this manner will be a path to peace. Nothing in history persuades me this is the case. Tyrant's hearts are not always softened by their victims refusing to fight back. Indeed, how many of the people killed, raped, or kidnapped on October 7 peacefully begged for their lives—or the lives of their children—only to be gunned down anyway? How many innocent people throughout history have pleaded for mercy to no avail? Were any Viking raids halted because the peasants fell to their knees in surrender? Any Cossack pogroms? 

No, I am not a pacifist. 

But then I went home and opened the news. And I saw the images of ruined Gaza bereft of inhabitants and reduced to smoking rubble. I heard the reports that almost the entire civilian population of the enclave—85%—has been displaced over four months of war. I learned that a large majority of buildings in Gaza—about 70%—have been destroyed. And that is not to mention the untold thousands of people who have been suffocated and killed in this devastation, a large portion of them children. And I get another—but quite different—nauseous feeling in my stomach. This one not of disgust, so much as shame. 

Because I feel that somehow I am responsible for those ruins—that the rage I felt at the pacifists on the street is part of what caused those smoking ruins. 

I know this is not literally the case. I try to remind myself—to plead for myself in extenuation before the bar of conscience and posterity—that I spoke out against the IDF's war crimes from the first days of Israel's response. I said that any military response to Hamas, however justified, must not take civilian life. I said that "The wake of mass atrocities and terrorist violence is the very hardest time to call for restraint in response [...] But such moments are also the most important possible time to issue such a call;" and I tried to offer one myself in the words that followed...

But who am I kidding? Whatever caveats I entered, the truth was that I felt (and still feel) a fury over what happened on October 7. And it was that same fury—however seemingly justified and righteous—that leveled those innumerable homes and neighborhoods in Gaza. 

One can (indeed, must, as a fundamental moral obligation) differentiate a legitimate thirst for justice for the victims of October 7 from an indiscriminate campaign of collective punishment and vengeance against the people of Gaza. And at the start of the bombing, perhaps, one could still believe in a "targeted" war that would spare the innocent. One could still believe that one was pleading for a reasonable middle way, whereby Israel and its U.S. allies would merely aim at removing Hamas's leadership, and then proceed to plan for a new future for Gaza under Palestinian Authority leadership, with the end result of a peaceful two-state solution still in view. 

But was such a thing ever actually possible? Or was it always inevitable that one (the seemingly justified war against the perpetrators of October 7) would be accompanied by the other (the grotesque collective punishment and destruction of innocent civilians, who had no role in Hamas's atrocities and are themselves victims of Hamas's rule)? Could such a campaign in an environment like Gaza, against a foe like Hamas that willfully endangers its own civilians, ever have ended differently? 

It is true, therefore, that everyone who endorsed Israel's retaliation is in some sense to blame for this result—even if we said at the time: "not this way!" For what other way could anyone have seriously expected this war to be conducted? And so, when we behold the smoking ruins of Gaza, is it not our words made manifest that we are gazing upon? Is that not our own arguments made flesh? 

And at once, in looking at those photos, "I suddenly took fright at this voice of mine/ This behaviour of mine and this/ Whole world." (Bertolt Brecht, Constantine/Kuhn translation).