As a Jew who gave my pennies to Israel growing up, who asked my parents to buy a tree for Israel instead of a birthday present, who had friends whose greatest ambition was to spend time on a Kibbutz, who was trained to believe I am Israel and Israel is me I sat at my kitchen table this evening in despair and confusion. All of this means nothing unless Israel pulls back. I remember the old saying “The Revolution will not be televised.” And now, if things play out in horrible ways, “The genocide will be streaming.” Do the leaders of Israel realize this. There is no way to black out horrific actions in 2023. My guess is Hamas already has plans to stream atrocities. And nothing will ever be the same. There have been many genocidal incidents over history, but it was always very abstract to the common person. It is what soldiers did in darkness. The media protected the powerful, or maybe believed they were protecting the larger population. Sometimes just a few photographs would make it through. The child running down the road in Vietnam her body ravaged by agent orange. But it we looked away it would be gone. Not this time. Every atrocity will be streamed one after the other as we witness screams of horror and tears beyond despair. People can scream about fairness (are atrocities ever justified?) but after the fifth of seventh day nobody will care. We will all just become sicker and more angry.
I wondered is there an answer. Israel has been terribly hurt and they feel they need to show the world that they will not be victims. They feel they must strike back. Bomb Gaza? Ground assault that will kill thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. I fear a band of children attacking soldiers and watching them being shot down on live stream. There will be no way to recover from this. How to solve this problem.
Except Israel has solved it before. Take a two tiered strategy. Make peace with the Palestinians, find a way to make their shared world whole. And at the same time hunt down the members of Hamas who were part of the attacks, across Israel, across the world. The same way they hunted down the Nazis after world war II. These hunters were some of the greatest heroes of the 20th century. Find the Hamas leaders and bring them back to Israel to stand trial. Not possible you say? My God, they gave Eichmann a trial, and it was a turning point for humanity. Good can come out of this. We can recapture who we were, We used to be a people of patience, understanding that six thousand years is but prologues. We understood the meaning of time and the idea that good will come from good. We need to be those people again. It is our chance.