Whispered in Gaza

 Regular readers of my Friday letters know that one of the topics that has engaged me continually over the years is the question of how the concepts of individual responsibility and collective guilt (and particularly collective guilt on the national scale) relate to each other in the worldviews of people who wish to think of themselves both as moral human beings and practical souls who live in the “real” world and who know how things sometimes must be done.

I’ve returned to this topic from the bimah many times over the years, speaking personally about this specific issue in any number of historical contexts. No one, for example, could be more caught up internally and emotionally in the story of the Shoah than myself. As a result, I cannot condemn any action deemed necessary by the actual people on the actual ground at the time to defeat Germany and its allies, and thus to rescue from annihilation the surviving Jews of Europe. And yet, even though I certain mean that wholeheartedly and fully unambivalently, I also can’t bring myself just to wave away the deaths of innocents—the children, not to mention the babies—who died in the effort to bring Nazi Germany to its knees, innocents who died in the carpet bombing of German cities or in the course of incidents like the firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945. The Nazis were monsters. But to exult in the death of babies would be grotesque. Easier would be to wave those deaths away with regret as unavoidable collateral damage—but that doesn’t feel quite just or ethically reasonable either. The loss of a child’s life is a tragedy no matter what language that child’s parents speak or how depraved those parents’ political philosophy might be. I really do think that. (How could anyone not?) And so I find myself on the horns of a great dilemma: wanting to maintain my self-conception as a moral human being, yet apparently able to accept the death of innocents as part of a greater plan to do good and bring peace to the world.

All these thoughts returned to me the other day as I visited, and the revisited again and again, a series of twenty-five short videos posted on the website of the Center for Peace Communications by a consortium of media outlets including the Times of Israel, the all-news Arabic-language television channel Al-Arabiya based in Dubai, and the anti-government Persian-language new site called Kayhan London. Entitled “Whispered in Gaza,” the videos feature regular Gazan types speaking openly and, I think, honestly about life under Hamas. These are not happy people. They think of themselves as victims as Hamas as intensely as do the residents of Sederot when rockets are sent over the border between Gaza and Israel with the express intent of killing Israeli civilians. But they dare not speak out for fear of the reprisals against themselves and their families that will almost surely follow, an issue even the people of Sederot don’t face. They couldn’t sound more sincere. Or more believable. And that brings me back to the issue I mentioned earlier: these people are not the enemy, but they share the fate of Gazans when Hamas goes to war, as they have repeatedly in the last decade, with Israel. Are these people the latter-day version of the citizens of Sodom on whose behalf Abraham was pleading when he suggested that the city could be spared if there were just ten decent people living within its boundaries? I’ve known that story my whole life. But suddenly a new question in its regard presents itself to me: what if there had been, say, eleven righteous souls in Sodom and God made good the promise made to Abraham and spared the city. Would the rest of the population—not the eleven, but all the other citizens of Sodom—would they have survived along with the eleven? I suppose they would have. (How else can you read the story?) How to translate that lesson to today’s situation in Gaza is not that obvious. But one inescapable conclusion would have to be that the decent people present in a sea of evil-doers and -wishers—be it in Sodom or Hamas-led Gaza or in Nazi-run Berlin—that those specific people are key players in the ultimate fate of their place, and that that is so even if they themselves don’t know it or would deny it.

To see the videos, click here. I’ve watched almost most of them now. Each is compelling. Each is tragic. Each is a reminder that Hamas’s victims include not only they people whose murder they have effected or sponsored within Israel, but also their own people—held captive by a terrorist government that brooks no dissent and punishes even the faintest whisper of non-allegiance. (To get a clear picture of what that means exactly, click here to read a hair-raising story first published in the British on-line newspaper, The Independent.)

You can start with Ibrahim (click here), a man who imagines living at peace with Israel as a basic right and who has nothing but scorn for the upper echelons of Hamas leadership who themselves have no interest in actually living in Gaza, but who live in Qatar or Turkey and from there pull the strings that make their fellow Gazans as miserable as Ibrahim sounds and no doubt truly is.  And then you can go on to listen to Zainab (click here), a woman who dares to think of Palestinians and Israelis as one people, or at least as the people of one land who can and should be able to live in peace. Her description of her “dream version” of Gaza is beyond moving. But, of course, she and Ibraham (and also all the others) are represented on the screen by animated portraits of themselves to prevent them from being identified by Hamas and duly punished for allowing themselves to dream of peace.

I was particularly moved by the testimony of Khalil (click here), a young man who remember his grandparents’ accounts of the “olden days” when Palestinians were free to travel into Israel and work in the nation’s cities alongside Jewish workers, whom they got to know and even to respect. And also striking was the testimony of Walid (click here), a young man jailed by Hamas on seven different occasions for daring to express himself freely, a basic civil right the exercise of which got him branded as a traitor to the Palestinian people. When, almost casually, he describes the experience of being arrested on seven different occasions for speaking out, in the context of which arrests he was beaten severely and, to use his own word, “tortured” by his Hamas captors, it’s impossible not to see in this young man an ally—a decent fellow whose great crime in life was to wish to express himself openly, a right we in our nation mostly take totally for granted.

Those are just a few of the voices I heard on that website. The videos are all short—mostly just two or three minutes long. The speakers speak in Arabic, but the subtitles are large and easy to read. The interviewers ask a few questions, but mostly the time is given over to the interviewees who are free to speak at length about their lives in Gaza.

Visit the site and you’ll see what I mean. These all sound like rational, decent people…and exactly the kind of people who could live in peace with their Jewish neighbors in Israel if they only had the chance. It’s beyond heartrending, the whole thing. The lot of these people is misery, oppression, and the endless fear of arrest. None is happy. But knowing they exist should be a source of hope for us all. Eventually, good triumphs over evil. And the day will come, I hope in our lifetime, when the people of Gaza find a way to chart their own course forward to a peaceful kind of co-existence with the neighbors and a bright future for their own children and grandchildren.

Given the current climate in the Middle East in general and in Israel in particular, it was very satisfying to spend an hour listening to video clips of people who dare hope for peace…and who found the courage to speak openly and honestly to the world through the Whispered in Gaza exhibition. Take a look and a listen. I think you’ll be as moved as I was.