Enough

On June eighteenth, Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, did the kind of thing that Lebanese presidents have historically not done, which is to look into the CNN camera and address the Israeli public as though they were people with whom a conversation was possible, which, given the circumstances of the last seventy-eight years, represents a premise that is at once optimistic and factually defensible. He asked whether we were not tired of a war that had endured since nineteen forty-eight, whether we genuinely wanted to live in peace, and said that if we did, all we had to do was sit down and talk, a formulation so reasonable that its simplicity sounded, in this particular context, almost like radicalism.
Aoun came to the presidency criticizing Iranian interference in Lebanese affairs, which in Lebanon is a position of courage comparable to advocating climate moderation at a convention of arsonists, and defending the disarmament of Hezbollah, the group that has been destroying its own country for decades in the name of a cause about which Lebanon was never consulted. What made that interview different was not the argument itself but the intended recipient. Lebanese presidents tend to speak of Israel as an abstract problem in statements designed for domestic consumption. Aoun spoke of us as neighbors who, like the citizens on his side of the border, wake up every morning inside something that nobody, on either side, chose at birth. He said this was the moment for the power of reason to prevail over the reason of power, and that sentence stayed with me for days.
One thousand two hundred Israeli women answered the question that no government has answered, not through diplomatic channels or official statements, but with an open letter signed by members of Women Wage Peace and the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum, whose members photographed the palms of their hands with a single word written in Hebrew, in English, and in Arabic, because in each of those languages the word sounds different and the exhaustion beneath it is the same. The Forum is made up of Israelis and Palestinians who lost children and decided, with that loss still inside their bodies, to sit beside whoever was on the other side when the child died, because they arrived at the conclusion, in the hardest possible way, that conversation was the only alternative to hatred, and that hatred, as a long-term strategy, has a track record that speaks for itself.
There is a difference between inheriting a war and choosing one that those born inside it rarely manage to see, because they never knew the before, and it is in that difference that Aoun’s question lives, addressed not to generals or politicians but to the people who, as he put it, genuinely want to live in peace and have not yet found a way to say so out loud in a manner that changes anything. I came from outside, chose this country with everything that came along with it, and learned that choosing a place is not the same as accepting everything that happens within it as a fact of nature, in the same way that loving someone does not mean agreeing with every decision, especially those that affect the neighbors.
Aoun’s question stayed with me because it was also the question I had been asking myself, at different moments, with different urgencies, in the specific way one formulates a question when the need to ask it does not stop and the answer keeps failing to arrive. We are not merely tired of a war that has lasted since nineteen forty-eight, we are exhausted, which is the stage beyond tired and distinguishes itself from it by the fact that the tired still expect to rest while the exhausted begin to question the road, and one thousand two hundred Israeli women said so out loud while the war was still ongoing, which is the only moment when saying that kind of thing costs something real and, for that reason, the only moment when saying that kind of thing means something.