I have been told the world needs, a hug, and I agree, but there are some things I cannot put my arms around. And if words only electrify anger, as they seem to now, comfort is hard to articulate.
I have been told I should not try to shock people rhetorically and I agree with that too. For sure. Yet I can’t see how it is possible to write anything now that is more shocking than what is happening on campus, on my screen, in those lands where everyone prays all the time.
I would prefer not to withdraw.
I want to be informed.
I want to have an opinion.
I hate to be indifferent.
But despite having grown up around Jews I feel no affiliation with Jewishness or Israel.
Despite having a temperamental bent for the underdog and against most things capitalist or colonizing, I feel no affiliation for Palestine either.
The way people talk about this conflict, to say nothing of its causes, makes all flags suspect.
I wave the flag of poetry and shared dinner and free speech.
(These have nothing to do with the “reality” I was once invested in understanding, once believed could be saved without one kind of genocide or another. )
I have never been willing to behead anyone or drop bombs on anyone, even though my unwillingness to do these things may align me with evil or be tantamount to suicide.
I wonder at my own naivete.
Still, I spoke with the woman who knows the teacher whose four-year-old is newly traumatized because of an Israeli bomb.
And I talked to the man who knows the Israeli who is in despair over a family member murdered by someone shouting Allahu Akbar.
How can I know these things and be on a side? Why are there sides?
How do I look over a connected world without being trampled beneath it?