The Blood in the Streets

Truly, as Brecht once said, we live in dark times. In Amsterdam this past week, soccer hooligans mounted a series of antisemitic riots and attacks, in a city where some residents are still old enough to recall the Nazi occupation. There is a particularly disturbing resonance to the fact that this violence is coming so close to the anniversary of Kristallnacht this weekend...

Any of us who live near university campuses or major cities have probably seen similar displays of antisemitism over the past year. Many have not been as egregiously violent—but people have been threatened for wearing the Star of David or accosted for waving Israeli flags. And, at many Gaza-related protests, signs that appear to endorse the atrocities of October 7 have been more the default than the exception. One could find a "Glory to the Martyrs" banner at just about every one. 

Such slogans seem quite clearly to endorse the killing of Jews because they are Jews. And if that's not genocidal, I don't know what is. 

But there are apparently also genocidal slogans being shouted on the other side too. The New York Times quotes a chant that was heard from a number of the Israeli soccer fans: "Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there." 

This one got to me like a kick in the stomach. And I'm not trying to draw some moral equivalency here or imply that this excuses the violence in these riots (it certainly does not)—just to say that this kind of behavior is also terrible in its own right. 

I also get that the people chanting this were merely one group of soccer hooligans. But unfortunately, I can't say it's the only time or place I've heard this chant—it's been reported elsewhere. 

I write this as someone who has mostly accepted the basic justice of the Israeli military response to October 7. To be sure, I don't approve of the IDF's tactics or how long they have dragged out the conflict, after decapitating Hamas's leadership. They plainly committed war crimes and completely failed in their obligations under international humanitarian law to avoid excessive civilian casualties and allow access to aid. 

But I thought Israel was basically justified in pursuing some military response to an attack aimed at the wholesale slaughter of their own civilian population. Any country would do the same. And I found the people lobbing charges of "genocide" against Israel, mere days after Hamas murdered over a thousand Jewish civilians in cold blood, to be grotesque. If anyone had an explicitly genocidal ideology, and was explicitly pursuing genocide here—it was surely Hamas. 

But reveling in the mass murder of Palestinian children surely is genocidal thinking in its own right. One doesn't excuse the other—my point is just that both are horrific. 

I truly felt winded inside when I read the words of this nasty chant. It's not just the fantasy of genocidal violence that it contains—but the fact that it comes as children in Gaza really are starving, burning to death, being crushed and suffocated in rubble from IDF air strikes, and dying of malnutrition and sickness amid the ravages of war. 

Gloating about the death of all these innocents, while their parents and siblings are still grieving and others are still dying, is literally breathtaking in its cruelty. 

I could only think of Pablo Neruda's haunting words, in his poem "I'm Explaining a Few Things"—which Harold Pinter read aloud in his Nobel Lecture, in a speech during the Iraq War that will always stand in my memory as my first and most powerful exposure to what a politically-engaged author should be. Writing of the civilian casualties of the bombing in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda said: "the blood of children ran through the streets/ without fuss, like children's blood."

And it's not only the children of Gaza who have met this fate in this war. Israeli children too have died or been forced to flee and seek shelter underground to avoid death from the skies. I don't in any way diminish the evil of that fact, either. I don't use one set of atrocities in this war to excuse another. All I say, to both Hamas and the IDF, is that they have to stop this. They have to stop killing children. They have to stop murdering innocents and reveling in that fact. 

But each says: the other side started it! Each says: the other side killed our children first! Each says: we have the right to retaliate! Our cause is just! But they are forgetting the first and only moral lesson of war. As Stephen Spender put it: "No cause is just unless it guards the innocent/ As sacred trust: no truth but that/ Which reckons this child’s tears an argument."