Deluge

Trying and failing to comprehend the state of my relatives’ home

Photo credit: Hatem Ali, AP

Every day since October 7 has been a trickle or a deluge of pain. Of course many moments of joy and obliviousness still. But so many days of face-burning emotion.¹

I’m furious at those who celebrate Hamas’s sadistic slaughter of ordinary people.

Furious at those who accept and excuse Israel’s banal, machine-mediated slaughter of ordinary people.

And demoralized by the vocal minority of my peers who think replacing one ethnocracy with another is a viable, let alone desirable, path to justice.

I’ve been discussing the past and the present, the context of Hamas’s crimes and Israel’s crimes, with friends and family, as we often do, not only when violence is at a fever pitch.

What I believe is so obvious, so mundane, and so commonly shared, it doesn’t even feel like it should be said. Yet I see there’s some value in saying it, both for the sake of my own ego and for the sake of building consensus together.

I believe that thousands of ordinary Palestinian people’s lives is vastly too high of a price to pay for the security of ordinary Israeli people’s lives. It’s a price that no one has a right to exact. And we have good reason to believe that this destruction, this expulsion, is not in the service of security, anyway. It’s the latest horrifying answer to the Demographic Question and it’s a wrong answer. So I think Americans should pressure our leaders to stop the bombing, to cease fire.

I also believe that we should pour our effort and resources into life-affirming coalitions for justice (see below), not into the religious fundamentalist bastardizers of justice. There are too few of these coalitions, and they have too little power. After the death and expulsion, the second most tragic consequence of this month’s atrocities is the further marginalization of these reasonable, serious voices.

We should remain clear-eyed about Hamas’s power, intentions, and actions. Their genocidal intent actually exists—they just demonstrated it—it is attached to billions of dollars and empires other than America, and it perverts the unassailable hopes and dreams of millions of Palestinian people. That’s why Netanyahu tries to make sure Hamas’s threat persists.

And here I’m talking to my American Jewish friends and relatives, too: We should remain clear-eyed about the toxin that is Jewish supremacy. It poisons our dreams and needs. It is the propellant on the bombs in Gaza and the driver of lynching in the West Bank. We must counteract it.

We should do everything in our power to bring home the 240 hostages—everything that isn’t massacring ordinary people and burying them beneath rubble.

I want—have always wanted—to be part of a movement that helps create a truly equal, secular, multiethnic democracy in the land. Without trading one people’s exile for another, and without using mass murder in order to avoid difficult political work, sacrifice, and concession. I’m under no illusion it will be easy. I’m under no illusion it will be bloodless. But it will be a hell of a lot fairer and stabler than what we’ve all got today.

Organizations whose work I watch, but whom I do not yet endorse:

• Standing Together Israel

• One Democratic State Initiative

• One Democratic State Campaign

• B’Tselem

Friends whose social media posts are informative and inclusive:

• Ziyad Asrar (Stories)

• Tara Raghuveer (Stories)

Articles that inform or reflect my understanding of this month:

• “On the American Left’s Response” by Zoe Keziah Mendelson

• “The Power of Apology” by George Bisharat (2004)

• “My mother taught me Jews are above vengeance. The Israel-Hamas war is finally making me doubt her” by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

• “Can the Liberal Democratic Project Incorporate Israel? Will It Survive If It Can’t?” by Freddie Deboer

I’m in LA now, about to begin a tour with Finom opening for The New Pornographers. We’re traveling up the West Coast to the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and home through Utah and Idaho. Sima’s daughter, Zulal, is with us, sure to provide giggles and levity and baby farts. I’m grateful more than ever to feel the ecstasy of music. To witness and take part in daily acts of creation rather than destruction. Oh, my god. It is so beautiful.

Thank you for everything each of you does, for keeping going.

1. I’m not used to feeling this way. I feel sunken, like my eyes are retreating into my head, and my mouth is freezing into a scowl. I know feelings like these are the norm for so many people who actually bear the brunt of injustice directly. Every day for them is a process of learning how to socialize, hold a job, and ascend to joy despite feeling searing resentment at both the holders and the bestowers of power. I have a deepened awe and appreciation for people who preserve their own tenderness, and who remain in service to others, despite these incomprehensible feelings. And I don’t blame those who can only wallow in them.