Since October 7, when the dark tide of Hamas torture and murder spilled out of Gaza onto the bordering Israeli settlements, killing over 1,400, the world has watched in horror as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)’s own floods of high-tech murder and torture rained down on the millions of innocent Palestinian civilians caught in what has aptly been called the world’s largest outdoor prison.
As I write today, on October 30, the butcher’s bill of casualties continues to grow, with authorities in Gaza reporting over 8,000 casualties so far, many of them children. With IDF ground troops rolling into Gaza now, those numbers are sure to spike upward. Yeats’s “blood dimmed tide” is still on the flood. And none of us, watching the horrors on TV, safely distant from the mud and the shrapnel, can pretend we are among the innocent. We are called to respond to what we witness, and if we fail in silence or fear to speak out, we are complicit with the hard men on all sides of this baffling moment, the killers in tanks and cabinet meetings, press conferences and tunnels, all of those who are willing to agree to the slaughter of innocents.
Yes, I know the Hamas attacks can only be understood in the context of decades of occupation and abuse suffered by Palestinians at the hand of the Israeli government and its settlers living illegally in the West Bank. And yes, I understand the grief and anguish that drives the IDF’s genocidal campaign of revenge. I have Jewish children and grandchildren and I want them to be safe in the world. I also desire unharmed safety for Palestinian children and civilians, and I cannot believe yet another round of blood-simple retaliation will do anything to make any of those kids safer. As Gandhi observed, the rule of “an eye for an eye” will, in the end, blind us all. And this round of war brings with it the dangers of a genocide against the Palestinians and of a larger regional conflict that could easily spin out of control into a world war.
I do not pretend that I know how to solve all of this, but I am certain on a few points. First of all, we should all be in the streets and lobbying our governments to urge an immediate and lasting ceasefire in Israel/Palestine. Let’s begin by ending the murder of children. Let us insist that Western governments re-examine their policies toward Israel, the Palestinians and the long-tormented homeland they share. For too long the West has interfered and lied, armed Israel to the teeth and sent signals that we will not criticize any military response by the IDF. This official posture is not only morally bankrupt: it is tactically stupid and self-defeating.
Every IDF shell that strikes down a home and kills its Palestinian residents will inspire new resistance fighters to spring up. The IDF attack on Gaza is Hamas’s most effective recruiting campaign. Even if this were not so, Western support for a campaign that responds to murder with more murder can only lead to yet more murder, and partisans on both sides can construct accounts in which the other guys started the fight. It all depends on how you tell the story. We need to step away from these bitter origin stories and find a way for the dispossessed of Palestine to have a real state, not a scatter of apartheid style Bantustans with no real sovereignty and no real safety. Without such a solution, the region will continue to drown in blood.
I began this essay with a quote from Yeats. I will end with another from Auden, who wrote in “September 1, 1939,” that “those to whom evil is done/ will do evil in return.” The tragic history of the last century in Palestine/Israel illustrates that bleak point.
This is on all of us. We cannot pretend we are not complicit, and we must not despair. Let’s campaign for a cease fire and end the slaughter of children. Then let us turn our minds and hearts to finding a solution that everyone in the region can live with. It won’t be easy: the history of the last seven decades makes that clear. But the alternative is to let our world and our history drown under the blood dimmed tide.
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