How Awful They Must Be, To Compel Us To Do Such Dreadful Things

I'm writing this post today, because all indicators suggest that tomorrow will be a terrible day.

It is a hazard of being Jewish that the commemorations of our worst moments are, for too many, an opportunity to victimize us further. The flurry of October 7 events that seek to reframe the day away from Hamas' massacre and onto the claim of an Israeli genocide are a case in point -- they are rhetorical salvos against the right of Jews to even grieve, against anything that might suggest that they, too, are inside the communities of concern. Those who say "the genocide didn't begin on October 7" prove too much: if the genocide didn't begin on October 7, then October 7 is not a distinctive date for commemorating the genocide save for those who argue -- with varying degrees of explicitness -- that "the genocide" makes October 7 justifiable or even praiseworthy.

I make that point wholly cognizant of the fact that for others, it is the Palestinian people who cannot be allowed to count as people, whose grief can only be understood as so much performance and manipulation. It is the same basic moral disease, only goring a different ox, and nobody should confuse recognizing the reality of what's happening tomorrow with some sort of tout court denialism of Palestinians right to grieve. Yet one catastrophe amongst many over the past year has been the choice of too many to view acknowledgment of legitimate grief as a zero-sum phenomenon -- we can only truly be in solidarity with these folks if we commit to truly hating those folks.

As terrible as that conclusion is, in a sense it does not surprise me. Many Jews were shocked at how rapidly October 7 seemed to accelerate a sense of hatred against Jews and Israelis. How was it that many people, it seemed, appeared to hate Jews and Israelis more, and more passionately, and more vocally, in the aftermath of October 7 than they did before? But I was not that surprised. Indeed, I understood this response as quite rational -- at least, from a given point of view. If one is truly committed to a pure politics of solidarity, of uncritical defense and apologia of anything and everything occurring under your banner, then the only way to metabolize an atrocity like October 7 is to flee into a deeper cavern of hatred and dehumanization. "How awful they must be, to compel us to do such dreadful things." The more dreadful the thing, the more awful they must be; for surely we and ours would never do engage in such murderous barbarism unless it was against the truly monstrous.

Lest anyone get too smug, this is the same basic impulse behind that sermon I heard last week in synagogue. The theme there, too, was to redirect the congregation's presumed aversion and revulsion towards the scenes of devastation in Gaza and in Lebanon, and explain why they actually showed the depths of our enemies' depravity -- they must be monsters indeed, to force those as righteous as us into such terrible acts. How awful they are, that they force us into such dreadful things. Or take that famous Golda Meir quote, "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children." 

It's the same theme, repeated ad nauseum. Recall what Montesquieu said about the Spanish atrocities against the indigenous population of the Americas:

Once the Spainards had begun their cruelties, it became especially important to say that "it is impossible to suppose these creatures [the indigenous population] to be men, because allowing them to be men a suspicion might arise that we were not Christian." 

And so too here. An earlier generation predicted that "The Germans Will Never Forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." Now it seems that Palestine solidarity advocates will never forgive the Israelis for 10/7, and the pro-Israel community will never forgive the Palestinians for the war in Gaza. Over and over again, the last atrocity is used to justify the next atrocity, and everyone it seems must play along as a means of expressing "solidarity".

So I expect tomorrow to be a terrible day, and not wholly or even primarily because it commemorates another terrible day. It will be terrible because it be an exclamation mark upon a year's worth of usage of atrocity as its own justification, a terrible cycle of self-generating and self-affirming hatred. Somehow worse than "they did this horror to us, so we must do that horror unto them" (and that's bad enough!), it will be "we did this horror unto them, so we must construct an even more vile image of who they are in order to justify it."

All I will say -- in acknowledged futility -- is that these are choices. It does not have to be this way. We can choose a different path. We can allow for Jews to grieve without complication for those lives destroyed October 7. We can allow for Palestinians to grieve without complication for those lives destroyed in the war on Gaza. We can choose to use tomorrow, and any other day, as an opportunity to deepen empathy and encourage different choices.

If that feels futile, maybe it is. I can't fathom any way to make Bibi Netanyahu choose differently, or Yahya Sinwar, or Columbia's CUAD students, or criminal UCLA "counter-protesters", or Tom "bounce the rubble" Cotton", or Ali Khamenei, or MAGA-hat extremists or professors with paraglider pictures pinned to their profile pics. Their choice to pursue politics of antagonism and hatred and dehumanization may be forever beyond me. Or forget them -- there are all too many people in my immediate circles, friends and loved ones, who I already know I will never be able to make choose differently, and that impotent thought hurts me immeasurably.

But I can choose differently. You can choose differently. Each of us can be a little better than what's going on around us. And who knows? Maybe a lot of people being a little better will make a bigger difference than one might think.

So as hard as it is, try to avoid the awful things that will pervade tomorrow -- the many, many, many voices that will try to persuade you to turn towards hatred and antagonism and extremism. And equally importantly, resist the inclination to flee so far in the other direction that you just develop a polar opposite hatred, antagonism, and extremism. Commit, tomorrow, to a different choice. I'll try my best too. We won't be perfect. But it's the best way I can think of to truly commemorate such a terrible day.