A year after the massacre of October 7, don't let the powers cloud the sacredness of all human life
Israelis want to live in peace and find a place to call home; the same is true for Palestinians. The powers that be are keeping them both from that hope.
On this anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel, I hope we all can be moved to grief and sadness, as we remember the loss of sacred life. What happened on that day was unnecessary, unthinkable, and unfortunately, far too similar to what Jewish people have experienced for decades, centuries, and even millennia. The attack of Hamas on Israel was a reminder for many Jewish people that even one day of safety cannot be taken for granted. I stand in grief and in solidarity with all Jewish people today.
I am tired of the lines being drawn the way they are. You can grieve the loss of life of Israelis on October 7 and at the same time, for the same reason, grieve the loss of life in Palestine. My hope is that our collective grief moves us to empathizing with all oppressed people. I hope that the pain we feel as we remember the horrors of October 7 moves us to feel the pain of all people looking, but failing, to find safety. Our grief about the massacre of Israelis on October 7 must move us to grief about the state of apartheid and genocide in Palestine. Peace for one group brings peace for the other. No one is free until everyone is free. We stand firm in our conviction, rooted in compassion for the other.
Sadly though, when we encounter a mortal attack, we want to move towards reprisal. And that’s exactly what happened after October 7. Benjamin Netanyahu, entirely backed and supported by the massive economic and military strength of the U.S., began to attack Gaza relentlessly. Netanyahu’s stated goal was to destroy Hamas, but in such a dense environment, his goal in practical terms was to destroy Gaza. While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have called for peace, they continue to arm Israel without condition and without leveraging their own power. The extent of this war is certainly a result of a foreign policy failure on Biden’s part.
I want the violence to stop. I want safety for all Jewish people across the world. I am afraid that Benjamin Netanyahu’s war and escalation of it throughout the region makes safety a much harder goal to achieve. It has made the region far more unstable, as war is wont to do. Extremists all over the Middle East are being born every day as they witness this genocide. Netanyahu’s actions don’t portend well for peaceful coexistence; instead they serve to cement the reality of forever war, extending this 75-year reign of apartheid. The war has helped no one but Netanyahu himself, and despite local protests, set him up for probable re-election. Meanwhile, his actions have caused both Hamas and Hezbollah to dig in their heels.
Our minds are twisted when we think the answer to violence is met with even more ferocious violence. There is no mistaking that fact that for Jewish people, safety has been hard to come by, especially in Christian Europe. Antisemitism is rampant in Europe to this day, and its Jewish population has dwindled in the last century. In some sense, Israel and the United States remain the safest places for Jewish people.
When we realize that we all want the same things—safety for our families and a place to call home—I hope we are moved to mutual understanding and solidarity. The Palestinian people and the Israeli people want the same things, and that starts with an end to the war.
Instead, what has followed October 7, 2023 had been a conflagration motivated by the political interests of powers greater than the people living in the land. Netanyahu, the United States, Iran, Russia, and others have geopolitical interests that contradict the priorities and goals of the people living in Israel-Palestine. And the hostility those forces breed deepen animosity and make peace a harder goal. They make this author wonder if peace is what the powers want at all.
Violence begets violence and never ends it. Too often, the war drums beat louder than this truth and louder than our consciences, and in our pain, we are quick to march to them, instead of listening to our own broken hearts and the broken hearts of others. I am guilty of this when I let my anger erase my empathy for my Jewish siblings. Today and this week, I stand in grief with them.
The powers that be benefit when they cloud our own discernment with their thirst for wars that politically benefit them. The extensive war and now genocide in Gaza is not about freeing hostages. We know that peace negotiations and diplomacy have actually released more hostages than bombs do. While 100 hostages remain in Hamas’s custody, there are 3,660 Palestinian hostages in Israeli custody. I hope we can move our grief toward peacemaking and peaceable coexistence. The horror of the October 7 atrocity is a rebuke of violence and colonial power. I hope and pray we can build another future and find another way, in solidarity with all who suffer.