One cannot protest in Israel now without taking it as personally as possible. Israeli public opinion is so closed, knowingly blind, that the only possibility of living and moving in it is against parts of itself. If you are a ‘leftist’, you are against ‘the Messianics’. If you tend to the right – you are against ‘traitors’. If you are a centrist, you are against both. At any rate, the basic assumption is that when ‘we’ are fighting ‘them’, we are going for the very same prize – whoever wins will be the ‘real Israel’. It is not possible to be Israeli, part and parcel of this public, and think that Israel is wrong, certainly not that Israel is behaving criminally. There is no way to protest without being, first of all, human.
However, it’s hard to be human. Hard to think through personal baggage and opinion that what is happening around us so sweepingly negates humaneness. It is hard to insist on being human in an environment that denies and wishes to prevent the possibility of being human. It is hard to be human vis a vis the range of it all, vis a vis destruction and annihilation and starvation and ruin to such an extent that the mind and heart of one person cannot really grasp them. Hard to be human, wholly human, wanting the possibility to go wrong and fix it, a human being who cannot grow without breaking up, facing so many who see their own existence as dependent on the total opposite. It’s hard to be human vis a vis so many people who wholeheartedly believe they cannot exist without winning.
This victory, even before negating ‘our’ humaneness, lies in negating ‘their’ being human. Recognizing their right to exist is an essential negation of our existence. We have worked very hard for decades, to make sure they disappear quietly. We oppressed, detained, interrogated, tortured. Even killed, but usually only to the point that did not break our ability to suppress the fact. We thought we had reached a certain modus vivendi, that we could continue doing what we wanted to Palestinians, to the present-absentees. We wished to make sure they know their place. It had to be outside our frame, heads bent down. They are not really human but we’d kill them only when it’s really necessary. The rest of the time let them live with themselves and bear the results of their ‘elections’.
And then came October 7, 2023 and showed us how we lied to ourselves. We didn’t manage to make them disappear and retain a ‘living and kicking’ democracy. They never disappeared. And if this is not enough, they attacked us! They horridly massacred civilians. They also raided army bases and took them over nearly without any resistance. First, they beat us in the battlefield. They made it clear that they were not going to willingly disappear. Attempts to claim that they planned to carry out a holocaust (or already had) are disconnected from any real context. The significance of what Gazans did in the second phase is that we can no longer pretend not to see them. We do.
But we do everything possible to convince ourselves that we do not see. The reason might be the media’s self-censure. It might also be the insistence that every death in Gaza is the Hamas’s responsibility. In both cases, we make huge efforts not to see. Thus, too, we give up our humaneness. Humans see. They are not always convinced, but humans see and hear and are present in the world. Israel chooses not to be in the world in any way. It is hard to be human and give up one’s humanity even on this very fundamental level.
But that’s the point. The challenge is not ‘repair’ nor ‘solution’. The challenge is one’s insistence on being human. Knowing how to lose and learn and get up. A human being knows his/her life is not superior to another’s for the mere fact that he/she is. A human being does not give in to fear that if ‘he/she’ is allowed to exist, ‘I’ will die. A human being is alive. Seeing, hearing, angry, sad, resistant. Long before any ‘end’, the challenge is the struggle over the mere possibility of moving along. The struggle for the possibility of being human.
Ori Goldberg is an Israeli author, academic, and political commentator.
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