Sri Lanka and Paris

Passover and Easter are unrelated festivals that derive from different traditions, but that’s not how it seems to many in the Christian world. That most of the world calls Easter by a name related to Pesach (cf. French “Pâques” or Danish “Påske”) is part of it. As surely also is the assumption, widely believed yet almost definitely not historically correct, that the Last Supper described in the Gospels was a Passover seder or some version of a seder. (For an exhaustive consideration of every aspect of that issue, which apparently remains a delicate one even today in some circles, click here.) Even the use of the word “passion” to describe the suffering of Jesus provided some fuel for this particular fire, at least in antiquity, since the Greek word for “to suffer,” pascho, is phonically almost identical to Pascha, the name for Passover in the spoken Aramaic of ancient Jewish times.

Given the proximity of the festivals this year and in light of the above, I would like to write this week specifically about two events that have befallen the Christian world just recently and explain how they appear to someone reading the news through Jewish eyeglasses.

First, Sri Lanka. The numbers keep rising. First, “more than 100” dead, then “more than 200,” now, as I write on Wednesday, a minimal figure of 321—minimal in the sense that many of those hurt in the explosions—more than 500 in their own right—are not expected to survive and only haven’t succumbed to their wounds yet. It’s far away. It’s not a country Americans think of daily. No one on the radio, including the BBC World Service, seems to know whether the first word in the country’s name is pronounced “shree,” or “sree.”  (In all fairness to the Brits, when they seized the place and unilaterally made it part of their empire, they called it Ceylon, which name everybody knew how to pronounce.) And yet…the sense of familiarity and shared humanity that incidents like this bring in their terrible wake seemed to overwhelm the rest of the details. Most Americans, I’m sure, couldn’t even say easily what language they speak in Sri Lanka or what the capital city is, let alone whether a majority of the citizens are Buddhist, Hindu, or something else entirely. Indeed, it felt at first like a terribly bad thing that had happened to other people. But then, just as the extent of the carnage was becoming known came the even more startling detail that the attacks on the three churches and four hotels were apparently planned as a kind of response to the assault on the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the course of which fifty Muslim worshipers were murdered. And with that single detail everything changed.

The single ideational concept that justifies terrorism in the mind of the terrorist is the ultimate fungibility of human life. Since I’ve been dealing in SAT words these last few weeks, I’ll add another: fungibility is the principle according to which things are deemed solely to have ascribed, not intrinsic, value. Paper money is the easiest example to seize: if I lend you five dollars on Monday and you come back on Tuesday to return the five dollars to me, I can’t sue you in court because the five-dollar bill you returned to me is not the same five-dollar bill I lent to you. But this is not so because it would make no sense to borrow money you were not planning to spend. It’s true because money in our culture is deemed fully fungible and, as a result, the paper bills we use as currency are supposed to have as their sole value the sum they represent, the sum ascribed to them by law. As a result every single five-dollar bill is deemed the equivalent of every other one and you can’t complain if you deposit a fiver in the bank one day and then receive a different bill from the bank the next day when you show up to withdraw your money.

This principle also applies to the eggs you borrow from a neighbor or the cup of sugar, but ethical people would never apply it to human life. To justify terror, however, is to do exactly that and willingly to ignore the fact that none of those people in church on Easter morning in Sri Lanka was responsible for the massacre in New Zealand and thus to feel justified in opening fire because you consider Christians to be as fungible as five-dollar bills and the shooter in Christchurch was presumed at least in some sense to have been a Christian. And that underlying notion makes it a humanitarian issue, not a Sri Lankan one or even a Christian one. This perverse line of logic is not unknown to Americans and it is certainly not unknown to Israelis: when someone is irritated by some or another Israeli policy and chooses to express that pique by blowing up a discotheque despite the fact that none of the young people on the dance floor was responsible for the policy in question—that too is an example of treating human life fungibly.

As a result, attempting to wave away events like this weekend’s horror in Sri Lanka as nothing more than the violent crime of an insane person is to miss the point: if the government is right to consider credible the statement by the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency tying the Sri Lankan bombings to the shooting in Christchurch, then the principled effort to eradicate terrorist groups and to banish their nation-state sponsors from the forum of nations is not only a practical response, but a deeply moral one. There are, of course, crazy people in the world who do crazy things. We Americans have had lots of examples of that in these last several decades! But terror is not craziness at all: by resting on the ideational foundation that considers all human life truly to be fungible and thus devoid of intrinsic value, terrorism comes to represent the ultimate devaluation of God’s greatest gift. As we approach the end of Passover and prepare to commemorate the destruction of Pharaoh’s armies in the sea, we should all take a moment to reflect on a deep, if unsettling, scriptural truth: violence undertaken to dominate or to oppress is wrong and fully sinful, but acting forcefully to combat evil is both ethically justifiable and, speaking morally, wholly right. Americans know this. Israelis certainly know it and so do New Zealanders. And now Sri Lankans have had the same lesson brutally brought to their own doorstep.

I brought a whole different set of emotions to my contemplation of the fire that destroyed such a significant part of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. It is, arguably, one of the most stunning pieces of Gothic architecture in the world and is surely one of the world’s truly great cathedrals. It took a hundred years to build. (Work was undertaken in 1160, but the project only drew to its conclusion a full century later in 1260.) There’s no reason for that specific detail to confound—work on St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue began in 1892 and the project still isn’t anywhere near finished—yet it somehow feels challenging nevertheless to think of a project spanning that much time and involving that many people. And all of it happening so long ago, and in an age without power tools, bulldozers, or electricity! For Jewish onlookers, on the other hand, the cathedral shimmers in a slightly different light.

For the Jews of France, the twelfth century was a terrible time. When work on the cathedral was still in its third decade, King Philip II expelled the Jews of France from his territory, apparently without the slightest interest in knowing or caring where they went once they left. When work on the cathedral was about halfway done, a council convened by Pope Innocent III—called the Third Lateran Council because it met at Rome’s Lateran Palace—disqualified Jews across Europe from holding public office, required Jews (and Muslims too) to wear distinctive dress so that they could not be mistaken in the street for Christians, and banned Jews from almost every profitable profession except pawnbroking and the sale of old clothes. But it wasn’t solely their economic lives that were under attack, but their intellectual lives as well: on March 3, 1240, when Notre Dame was a mere twenty years away from completion, church officials burst into synagogues across France—March 3 was a Shabbat in 1240—and carted off entire Jewish libraries. Eventually the king of France, Louis IX—who is recognized as a saint both in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and who is the St. Louis after whom the city in Missouri is named—insisted that the Talmud itself be put on trial. The ancient work was defended by a quartet of able rabbis, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion and then, on a day that lives on in infamy as one of the pre-Shoah world’s most outrageous acts of violent anti-Semitism, twenty-four cartloads of books—some 10,000 volumes, including irreplaceable works that would be considered of inestimable value today—all twenty-four cartloads of books were burnt in public on the Place de Grève, now called the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, just across the river from…Notre Dame de Paris.

Notre Dame itself features one of the most hateful of all anti-Semitic symbols on its front façade, where are depicted Synagoga and Ecclesia (“Church”) as a pair of very different women, the one (Synagoga, of course) dressed in rags, a snake covering her eyes, a broken scepter in her hand, and the tablets of the law slipping from her grasp, and the other, Ecclesia, depicted as a proud, attractive woman standing fully erect while carrying a wine chalice in one hand and a staff with a cross at its top in the other. The insult couldn’t be more clearly put. Nor has it lost its punch over the centuries: even though the statues were destroyed during the Revolution, they were both were restored and replaced during the nineteenth century. They’re still there too, inviting any eagle-eyed visitor to learn the lesson they were set in place to teach: that Judaism is defunct, dead, and disgraced, whereas Christianity is triumphantly and gloriously dominant.

So when I look at Notre Dame and feel the same pang of regret all civilized people surely do when a world-class work of architecture is damaged, I also recall the world that gave birth to Notre Dame and its harshness, its cruelty, its violence and its deeply engrained prejudice against Jews and against Judaism. And I think of poor Synagoga as well, and wonder what she would have to say if she were somehow able to shove the serpent aside and open her stony eyes onto the world. Would the fact that she’s still on display all these centuries later surprise her? And what would she have to say to the thirteen million visitors who walk by her on their way into France’s most famous cathedral? Would the resurgence of anti-Semitism in France surprise her? Would the existence of an independent Israel? Would anything? Those are the questions that the fire at Notre Dame prompts me to ponder on these coming final days of Pesach.

Passover 2019

The Latin word for “thing,” res (pronounced like the English word “race”), lives on in English in certain stock phrases like res ipsa loquitur (“the matter speaks for itself,” a legal principle having to do with the assignation of responsibility in cases involving apparent negligence) or in media res (“in the middle of the thing,” a phrase first used about two thousand years ago by the poet and satirist Horace to reference the literary technique of beginning a story in the middle of the action). But it also lives on in the ten-dollar English word “reification,” used in many different disciplines to denote the practice of treating something that exists without physical existence (like an idea or an emotion) as though it were a “thing,” i.e., something that exists fully really in the physical universe.

The word is unknown to most, but the practice will be completely familiar to all. Silence is technically not a thing at all, after all, just the absence of a thing (sound or noise), but when Simon and Garfunkel sang about the “sound” (originally, the “sounds”) of silence, no one found that confusing or misleading: the lyric was so effective precisely because silence reified, i.e., treated as a “thing” and not merely as the absence of some other thing, feels so real and so unnervingly ominous. And the same is true in a million other contexts as well. Peace, after all, is also not a thing, just the absence of other things (war, strife, fractiousness, tension), but what parent using the words of the Priestly Blessing to pray that God grant a child “peace” doesn’t think of it as something that someone can either have or not have, as an actual thing that God bestows on the fortunate—but not as the mere absence of some other thing?

As we approach Pesach, I’d like to bring the concept of reification to bear in my pre-paschal thoughts about freedom. Passover is, after all, acknowledged in our liturgy as z’man cheiruteinu, “the season of our freedom.”  But freedom could also reasonably be described as an example of reification, as something that we like to talk about as though it were something that fully exists in the physical sense of the word but which at its most basic is merely the name we give to the state characterized by an absence of some particularly baleful other thing (oppression, domination, coercion, repression, subjugation, persecution). And it is precisely because these are all such awful things that no one would want any part of—it’s precisely because the absent things listed above are so pernicious and undesirable that we find it simpler to think of their absence as a state unto itself, as a thing, as a res.

But is it really so? That’s the question I’d like to explore today in full pre-Pesach mode.

It was Kris Kristofferson who wrote the famous lyric according to which freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose. Behind those words, which I imagine no one my age can read without hearing Janis Joplin’s voice singing them out in that unforgettable voice, lies a restatement of the theory described above according to which freedom is by definition the state in which you have no restraints or constraints forcing you forward in some specific direction, the state in which you suffer no consequences at all—that’s what it means to have nothing to lose—by choosing the path forward in life that strikes you as the one you’d like to travel into the future. In other words, freedom is defined as life without the police telling you to obey posted speed limits and parking regulations, without the IRS telling you to pay your taxes, without your accountant telling you to buy health insurance if you don’t want to pay a fine for not self-insuring, without the dentist telling you to floss your teeth, without the universe yelling at you not to smoke, not to gain weight, not to take drugs, not to ride a bicycle without a helmet on your head, not to drive without fastening your seat belt, not to steal candy from the 7-11, and not to let your dog mess up the sidewalk. (And, yes, without your rabbi telling you how to live your life.) Freedom, so Kris and Janis, is not having anyone telling you that you have to do anything or behave in any specific way. Freedom is doing what you want, thus specifically not a thing at all.

But the Torah offers an alternate approach, one that proposes freedom as something to be merited, to be earned, to worked towards and striven for. The Israelites hated being slaves, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But what they yearned for wasn’t mere emancipation from slavery and its countless rules to follow and commands to obey. They weren’t interested, so goes the story in Exodus, in becoming free citizens of Egypt, in casting off the bonds of servitude so they could take their rightful place in Egyptian society, in being who they already were except not slaves. Indeed, in their minds manumission from slavery was just the prerequisite for what they really did want, which was the freedom to travel to the land God had promised their forebears and there to create a culture reflective of the finest moral virtues and fully rooted in the sacred concepts the Torah spells out as the foundation stones upon which the ideal society rests. By calling Pesach z’man cheiruteinu, tradition teaches us that being free is specifically not having nothing left to lose. Referencing Passover as “the festival of our freedom,” in fact, implies just precisely the opposite: that being free means having everything to lose…and then finding the internal stamina—and the profound moral courage—to live according to the internal principles you wish to guide you forward, to leave the familiar behind and enter the wilderness through which all must pass who wish to come both to their personal promised land and also, on a national level, to the Promised Land, the one in which national and personal destiny coalesce in a seductive amalgam of personal fulfillment and national destiny. To be free does not mean doing what you want to do. It means doing what you want to be.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. And our seder rituals reflect the complicatedness of the task at hand.

Matzah itself is a good example. What is it exactly? Our Jewish tradition features two stories that don’t fit at all well together, or at least that don’t at first blush appear to. The story we all tell and retell features the Israelites leaving Egypt with such alacrity that they have no choice but to bring along their unrisen dough, which somehow (and just a bit fancifully) turns into the matzah crackers that thenceforth will forever symbolize the yearning for freedom. But the Haggadah also features an entirely different idea: when we lift up the plate of matzah and declare that “this (i.e., the matzah) is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt,” we are identifying matzah as the kind of cheap, tasteless bread that slaveowners feed to their slaves, thus the foodstuff par excellence that symbolizes the misery of chattel slavery. The stories appear to constitute two different approaches, one featuring matzah as symbolic of slavery and the other taking it to symbolize freedom. But the truth is that the stories fit quite well together if you interpret the two explanations in each other’s light: the story seems to be that the Israelites, for all they surely yearned for freedom, soon found that shucking off the actual chains that held them in place was one thing and becoming truly free individuals something else entirely. They wanted to eat fresh, yeasty bread, the bread of free people, but they ended up with the tasteless bread that slaves eat instead. And that suggests, to me at least, the arduousness of the journey to true personal freedom…and the degree to which it isn’t ever really enough just to self-define as free. You have to find the courage to loose the bonds that hold you in place, that dictate your behavior even though there aren’t any actual taskmasters preventing you from shucking them off. To want to live free is not that challenging. But truly to step away from the leg irons that keep you moored to your own worst habits and least appealing character traits—that requires a lot more than just self-defining as free.

The whole dipping thing—obscure to most, yet also granted such a prominent place in the Haggadah as one of the famous four questions posed by children to their elders at the seder—has a similar lesson to teach. The use of dipping sauces was a mark of luxury in ancient times, thus reasonably symbolic of the freedom enjoyed by people of means to glide forward through life unimpeded by financial constraints. And so, to mark our status (albeit just obscurely for most), we too eat while symbolically reclining (another habit of the wealthy) and begin our meal not by tearing into the main course but by enjoying some genteel dipping while the servants are busy in the kitchen roasting the paschal lamb. But even there the actual ritual tells a slightly different story. We take fresh vegetables and dip them not in tasty sauce but in our own tears, here represented by the salt water on our seder tables. We dip a second time too, a point made explicitly by the inquisitive children asking the questions, but the second time is even worse: we take the bitter herbs that symbolize our ancestors’ wretchedness and dip it in charoset deemed symbolic of the mortar the Israelites used to build Pharaoh’s cities and monuments. So we’re doing the free person’s thing, but we can’t quite get rid the baggage we bring to the ball: we’re trying to mimic the wealthy and the free…but we can’t quite do it. We surely want it. But, just as our ancestors found being free to be something different than merely not being slaves, so do we too have to accept that freedom is not only a thing, but a heavy thing at that and one that it takes training to be able easily (or at all) to lift and carry forward.

The moral of the story: this whole freedom thing is harder than it looks. To be free means not to be a slave to anyone, including not to yourself.  And no one has a more demanding taskmaster than the self-enslaved! This year, as we gather for our s’darim and for communal worship, I invite you all to join me to seeing this not as yet another opportunity to spend too much time in shul and to consume way too many calories, but as an opportunity for true personal growth…the kind that has the ability to make of slaves truly free people.

Israel

In these United States, there is always—or almost always—a kind of a lull in the frenzy just before Election Day in presidential election years. The candidates have or haven’t made their cases. The rallies are over. The officials charged with overseeing the voting procedure itself take over and make ready the polling places and the ballots or voting machines. The network news teams poised to cover the vote-counting run mostly background pieces so as to have the time to prepare for their Big Day. And the electorate, the actual people poised to cast the actual ballots, are thus given a bit of breathing space in which to reflect on their options and their choices as a way of preparing to exercise their franchise and, in so doing, to participate personally in charting the nation’s course in the coming four years.

The lead-up to the election earlier this week in Israel was nothing at all like that. Just the opposite, actually: from my perch here in the cheap seats, things actually appeared to be speeding up and becoming, if anything, even more frenzied in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election as the candidates displayed ever-heightened eagerness to step out of their own shadows and into a favorable enough light to win them the lion’s share of the votes about to be cast.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, for example, announced his theoretical intention to begin annexing parts of the West Bank. This, of course, would be impossible practically or politically, which reality was rather starkly mirrored by the almost complete lack of response to the proposal from the Palestinians themselves…or from any other quarter of serious consequence. But the P.M., still reeling from the Attorney General’s announcement last month that he, Bibi, is about to face the AG’s effort to bring charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust against him and taking a page from our own president’s playbook, chose to make his dramatic announcement as a way of playing to his own base…and making it clear that a vote for anyone but for himself will lead Israel directly towards the unpalatable, but without him inevitable, prospect of having a second terror state on its longest border. And any Israeli regardless of political orientation will agree easily that one is more than enough! 

For his part, Benny Gantz had his own challenge to face, namely convincing the public to look past the slightly troubling fact that he has no political experience at all and that holding the highest office in the land would thus be his first foray into politics. But—and this had to be the truly challenging part—he had to pull that off without making him sound like the Israeli Donald Trump. (That comparison wouldn’t have been all that fair:  before the incumbent was elected, the United States had already had four presidents who came to the presidency without ever having been previously elected to public office: Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Other than Hoover, however, all were war heroes. And Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, which leaves Trump as the sole example of an American president with no prior record of public or military service at all.) Still, Gantz—and his slightly unexpected political bedfellow, Yair Lapid—gave it their all and, at least in my opinion, managed to make Gantz sound not like a dilettante or a last-minute dabbler but like a serious politician poised to lead the nation forward in a way that would both address its security needs (Gantz, a well-respected general, served as chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces from 2011 to 2015) and find a path forward to peace with the neighbors and their allies throughout the Arab and Muslim world. (Also not lost on anyone is the fact that Israeli law forbids a Chief of Staff from entering politics for a period of three years following his service to the IDF in that capacity, so this was actually Benny Gantz’s first opportunity to run for election—which only made him feel to most far like less someone who somehow arrived out of nowhere to run for the highest office in the land and more like a leader-in-waiting who had no choice but to bide his time until the opportunity to run finally presented itself.)  

And mixed into all of this were the side-show candidates, another way in which Israeli elections tend to differ from American ones: under our rules, candidates with no chance to win tend to fall away even before their parties’ conventions, while in Israel the fringe candidates remain vocally and fully visibly in the race until Election Day. Indeed, the Israeli political system itself more or less precludes the premature dismissal of almost anyone at all, including people with no real chance of winning, for the simple reason that it is generally understood that the chances any party at all has of winning a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset is basically zero. (This is historically so as well: in the seventy-one years since Israel was founded as a nation in 1948, it has only happened once that a single party had a majority of seats in the Knesset…and the slimness of that majority—one single seat—led to elections within a year.) And so, other than for those few months in 1969, Israel has always been ruled by some sort of coalition—either a so-called “grand coalition” featuring only the two largest parties or, far more commonly, a coalition cobbled together by the leader of the party that won the most votes that inevitably includes people who would be marginal figures in most other settings. (Readers unfamiliar with this strange process that regularly invests parties just large enough to have a handful of seats—or a single seat—in the Knesset with power far out of sync with the size of their supporter-base can click here to see the very thoughtful and thorough essay on just that topic by Evelyn Gordon published in the on-line magazine Mosaic just last week, which I read carefully and from which I myself learned a lot.)

And now we have the results. Sort of. Or rather we do, but without knowing with anything like real certainty where they will lead. This is also a huge difference from our American system where, yes, the results of the popular vote in a presidential election have to be either confirmed or not confirmed by the Electoral College, but where the outcome of that vote can be predicted more or less certainly once the popular vote is counted. (Yes, there is the issue of the so-called “faithless elector” in our country to reckon with, but it’s not much of one: out of the 23,548 electors who have participated in our nation’s 58 presidential elections since 1789, only 157 have voted for candidates other than the one they were supposed to support…and of them 71 had to support an alternate candidate because the one they were theoretically supposed to support had died between Election Day and the vote of the Electoral College.) But in Israel, voters vote for parties, not candidates, and the normal practice is for the President of the country to invite the leader of the party that won the most seats to form a government. As of when I am writing this, that has yet to happen.

To most outsiders, it feels like a kind of a tie: 35 seats for the Likud, Netanyahu’s party, and precisely the same amount for the Blue and White party led by Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid. Yes, the Likud got more votes, but only about 14,000 more—which margin turned out not to be meaningful in terms of Knesset seats awarded. So, a tie. But also not a tie because the nature of coalition politics in Israel puts the Likud firmly in the driver’s seat with a coalition of ultra-Orthodox and right-wing parties bringing their combined thirty seats to the ball, thus giving Bibi the ability easy to form a government with a 65-seat majority. Not such a big majority, it’s true. But the parties who promised to join Gantz and Lapid in a new government only won twenty seats. And so the 35-35 tie turns more meaningfully into a 65 to 55 victory for the Likud.  Or does it? There are apparently still tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted and if those new votes grant even a single extra seat to the Blue and White party, then that could conceivably be enough to force the President’s hand and oblige him to ask Benny Gantz to see if he can form a government. And with that the rules of the game would change yet again. He might not be able to do it, but he also might—the nature of coalition politics in Israel is that no one dances with the one who brung him (or her), that the system resembles more than anything a vastly consequential game of musical chairs in which there are more bottoms than chairs to accommodate them and whoever scrambles fast enough when the music stops stays in the game, and in which it isn’t ever really over until it’s really over.

So, at least as I write this on Thursday morning, it feels like there will be a fifth Netanyahu government. That is either good or not good for Israel, but for Americans like myself who support Israel wholeheartedly and without reservation it means coming face to face with an unpalatable reality, or at least with one widely perceived as unpalatable. I am not a huge fan of the Prime Minister’s, and not solely because he betrayed my colleagues in Israel by reneging on the Kotel deal after it was widely considered to be a done deal. Indeed, there are lots of reasons to feel uncertain about his leadership and surely not least of all because he is facing indictment on multiple charges involving bribery and corruption. And yet, despite it all, I continue to be a firm supporter of the democratic ideal. The people spoke. The man won, sort of. We have no choice but to move forward and, as we do, to support vocally and unequivocally not the man or the party, but the inalienable right of the people to choose their own leaders and, in so doing, to chart their own destiny forward into the future. What American could argue with that?

Gaza

A news story appeared briefly last week in the press and then vanished. It wasn’t much of a story, just a vignette really, but it has stayed with me ever since and feels, at least to me, as though it encapsulates the intractable nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza. And yet…somewhere within its scant details I also see a bit of light, perhaps even some reasonable hope.

The story concerned two eight-year-old boys who somehow managed to slip across the border into Israel armed with a single knife between the two of them. They were apprehended and almost immediately, disarmed, then sent back across the border into Gaza. That’s the whole story.  

When asked what they had been hoping to accomplish, the boys explained that the plan was to be arrested and eventually sent to an Israeli prison. Left unexplained was why exactly they wanted that to be their fate. The media reports I read seemed to assume that the point was for the boys were baby terrorists hoping to become famous by murdering a civilian Israeli and then bravely by enduring life in an Israeli prison no matter how harsh the conditions. But it feels—to me, at least—at least possible that the idea was something else entirely and that the boys were attempting to get out of Gaza the only way they could think of—by getting themselves arrested and sent to an Israeli prison where they knew (or at least hoped) that children would be treated leniently and perhaps even kindly. Where there would be clean water, fresh food, and medical care. Where they might even just possibly have a school for underage inmates to attend.

So that’s my fantasy, developed within my own ever-hopeful brain as the protests at the Gaza-Israel border started up again on the one-year anniversary of their original outbreak. Over 40,000 Palestinians showed up for the anniversary rally, but the scene was really quite different from what we saw at the border a year ago. Within an hour, half the protesters had gone home. An hour after that, there were just a handful of stragglers left. The whole thing had a largely pro forma feel to it. Yes, some people did throw grenades or Molotov cocktails in the direction of the fence along the border, but the large majority of people who showed up for the protest stayed away from the border and did not risk provoking the inevitable Israeli response to any effort to cross the border illegally. The Health Ministry in Gaza, run by Hamas, claimed that two people, both teenaged boys, were killed during the protest and that hundreds were wounded. (They didn’t say by whom, but the clear implication was that Israeli soldiers had shot, yet again, at innocent protesters.) More to the amazing point was the presence, visible to all, of Hamas officials wearing day-glo orange vests stationed between the crowds and the border, and almost entirely effectively preventing anyone from rushing the fence or trying to cross into Israel. This was, by all accounts, something entirely new.

Partially, the credit goes to Egypt’s efforts to mediate a peaceful modus vivendi on the Gaza border. And another part surely goes to the IDF, which, by deploying a large number of soldiers at the border and providing them with serious support from the air, indicated clearly that it was going to do whatever it was going to take to prevent Gazans from crossing the border into Israel and harming Israeli civilians. But there is also the possibility that the Gazans themselves are growing weary of this endless battle with Israel and are yearning for the kind of normalcy that can only be a function of peaceful co-existence with Israel.

Supporters of Israel, and myself among them, never grow tired of pointing out that the residents of Gaza formally elected a Hamas-run government to lead them in 2007 and so must now bear the consequences of having terrorists for their political leaders. (There are no plans for any sort of new elections, the general disinclination of terrorists to cede power peacefully to others being one of the negative side-effects of installing a government led by terrorists in the first place.) The seemingly endless barrage of missiles aimed at civilian centers in Israel, the government’s willing to squander countless millions of dollars of aid money—by some estimates $40 million annually (click here for more on that sum)—to build the so-called “terror tunnels” whose sole function is to allow terrorists to cross unobserved into Israel, and the intensive indoctrination of Gazan children to think of Israelis as monsters and oppressors rather than nearby neighbors yearning to find a way to co-exist peacefully with the neighbors (which is the attitude of more or less every single Israeli I know personally or have ever known)—all of this makes most Israelis and supporters of Israel despair of there ever being any sort of resolution to the conflict.

It’s a small place, Gaza. The border with Israel is only thirty-two miles long. The border with Egypt is not even seven miles long. The whole place is a mere 141 square miles. (By way of comparison, Nassau County occupies 453 square miles of Long Island.) But 1.8 million people live there, which yields the figure of more than 13,000 residents per square mile. (Nassau County has fewer than 3,000 people per square mile.) So that’s a lot of people in just a very little space. Since throwing in their lots with Hamas, the Gazans have been under an Egyptian and Israeli blockade designed to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza. That certainly sounds reasonable to me given Hamas’s openly proclaimed policy never to co-exist peacefully with Israel and their willingness to use the weaponry available to them to attack civilian Israelis inside Israel. But it also means the Gazans, for all they have the government they elected in place, are even less the masters of their own fate than they were before Israeli withdrew unilaterally in 2005 and inadvertently created the vacuum that Hamas was invited by the populace to fill.

And so we can frame this as a tale of two sets of two boys: the two seventeen-year-olds killed in the tumult at the border the other day as part of a pointless riot that had absolutely no chance to effect anything like meaningful change (and which merely put tens of thousands of people in harm’s way), and the two eight-year-olds armed with a single knife who somehow managed to enter Israel and whose plan was possibly—at least in my own fantasy version of the story—to be arrested and sent to a prison that would presumably feature at least some of the trappings of normal life. The teenagers killed at the border symbolize to me the pointlessness of violence and the dismal prognosis for Gazan residents if they prove unable to turn away from Hamas and embrace leaders eager and willing to live in peace with Israel. The little boys apprehended in Israel, on the other hand, represent some strange combination of daring and willingness to look across the border and see, not monsters or murderers, but young men fully human who only want to go home safely to their families and to live in peace. Obviously, I don’t know these little boys. I don’t even know their names. (Because of their age, their names were not released to the public.) But I’d like to think that they represent the Gazan version of the boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the one who saw what his eyes actually did see rather than what the grown-ups all around told him constantly told him he was seeing.

I was in Israel in 2005 during the Gaza withdrawal. There were people everywhere wearing orange ribbons to indicate their ill ease with the notion of withdrawing from Gaza other than as part of a larger peace deal with the Palestinians. And some of the televised scenes we all witnessed of Jewish people being forcibly removed from their homes were wrenching to watch…and that was a sentiment shared by all regardless of political persuasion or affiliation. But, in the end, it was what Ariel Sharon wanted. The Knesset approved the plan in February of 2005.  And before Rosh Hashanah it was all over and there was not a single Israeli in Gaza. It was a stunning act of hope on the part of Israel, a unilateral leap into an unknown future justified by the feeling that it could conceivably lead to Gazans taking charge of their own future and turning away from violence and towards peace. Within two years, Hamas was firmly in charge. And now, a dozen years later, the situation feels just as dismal as it did following the Hamas electoral victory in 2007. But hope is a funny thing—it becomes dormant but it never quite dies…and I continue to hope that cooler heads will eventually prevail, that Hamas itself will realize how much money it has wasted and how many lives the mindless violence it promotes has cost the Palestinian people with no appreciable gain at all, and that the people of Gaza themselves will follow the example of two little boys by looking into Israel and seeing not a hellish landscape populated by ogres and fiends, but a land flowing with milk and honey populated by people eager and willing to do what it takes to live in peace.