Majdal Shams and a Mother’s Plea

My wife called me this morning. She’d just arrived at her work, a clinic in Jerusalem. She was sitting in the car and, for the first time since the war started, she was breaking down. She was crying. It wasn’t October 7th that triggered her. It wasn’t the deaths of the children of our community that triggered her.

It was the deaths of twelve children from the Druze community of Majdal Shams.

“Why?” she asked, “Why do these people all have to be so damned selfish?” She wasn’t speaking about the Druze, she was speaking about Biden and Trump, Netanyahu and Harris, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Druze of Magdal Shams are in a very particular place. Not just physically, but politically. The vast majority of the population has long rejected Israeli citizenship and retained their Syrian citizenship. As a result, they have the right to study and work in Israel, but they can’t vote. Although about 25% of the population now have Israeli citizenship, in 2022, only 313 people in Majdal Shams (population 12,000) voted in the elections – an election with 70% turnout nationally. While the Jewish populations of the North have largely been evacuated, creating 80,000 internal refugees, the Druze population of Majdal Shams largely hasn’t. Their town is only 6 km (4 miles) from Lebanon and a mere 150 meters (500 feet) from Syria. They are definitely within range of Hezbollah.

Nonetheless, they had no reason to worry.

Majdal Shams could happily consider itself a town that was not at war with Hezbollah or Syria. Their ties to other Druze were far more important than any ties to Israel. At the same time, the Israeli government hardly wants to discomfit them. The Druze populations within Israel have been among the most ardent supporters of the state. Many from their tiny community have fallen in battle in the most recent war – and many earlier conflicts. While national policies aren’t as charitable as they should be, the Druze are considered heroes of Israel. However, while their allegiance to Israel is certainly strong, their allegiance to each other must be stronger still. Theirs is a tiny minority in a violent region. There are fewer than one million Druze in the entire world.  They must stand up for each other. Because of this, politically, Israel can’t be seen abandoning the Druze – even those Druze who distance themselves from us.

Because of these factors, even in a war zone, the town could be considered safe. It would seem that nobody had any reason to target Majdal Shams. The sort of shock that must be reverberated within the Druze community must be hard to fathom. After all, the Druze who don’t live in the Golan Heights have long been a bridge between the parties in the conflict. Although it is an odd illustration of that fact, in 2022, a Druze teenager named Tiran Fero was injured in a car crash in Jenin. Upon hearing of an Israeli in Jenin, the local Palestinian Islamic Jihad went to the hospital where he was being treated, killed him in his bed and took his body hostage. The Druze threatened to attack Jenin themselves if the body wasn’t returned. Palestinian homes were firebombed by Druze soldiers and Palestinian workers were kidnapped and beaten by Druze men (with the threat of execution if the body wasn’t returned). While the Druze response was notable, the core of the story is that the Druze expected safety in Jenin – a militant West Bank city.

There was no reason for them to be attacked there – or in Majdal Shams. And yet they were.

What possible cynical motive would lead to an attack on Majdal Shams? 

The Sacrifice of Children

Was the goal of this  attack simply the exacerbation of internal conflicts within Israel itself? It certainly puts Israel in a difficult position: One man was killed in Tel Aviv and Israel struck Yemen hard. Twelve kids were killed in Majdal Shams and what does Israel do? Do they go to war in Lebanon at the potential cost of hundreds or even tens of thousands of lives (including those of many Druze). Or do they carry out a few symbolic strikes and leave the deaths largely unavenged. Their population has long publicly rejected Israel. Nonetheless, if Israel fails to avenge them (and make no mistake, as the story of Tiran Fero illustrated, the Druze expect vengeance) then there is a grave risk of alienating the Israeli Druze population – who occupy many core positions in the IDF, and have been ardent supporters of the State. Israel is being cast on the horns of a horrible dilemma.

My wife and I had spoken about this before she broke down. We’d spoken about the cynicism of the calculations. Of the willingness to sacrifice these completely neutral children simply to weaken Israel from within.

As she put it “what people can be so selfish that their entire society is built just to eliminate another people?” I knew who she was talking about. In 2002, Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech in which he pronounced:

But I’ll tell you. Among the signs […] and signals which guide us, in the Islamic prophecies and not only in the Jewish prophecies, is that this State [of Israel] will be established, and that the Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine, not in order to bring about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, but rather that All-h the Glorified and Most High wants to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place–they have gathered in one place–and there the final and decisive battle will take place.

Hezbollah believes that they are conveniently located to carry out the will of All-h and exterminate the Jews. Iranian rallies have been epitomized by their chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” The Houthis official slogan is “God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam!” While it has since been modified, Hamas’ 1988 charter quotes the Koran, stating:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”

For these people the purpose of their existence – the path to their Messiah – is the death of another people. It is a selfish path. A path that sees gain only through the lens of others’ loss.

The Power of Families

My wife’s anger was spread liberally to all those whose efforts to stay in power have led to the loss of life, or have failed to protect it. I asked her to make a video, but she refused.

“Who am I?” she asked, rhetorically. “I’m a nobody. Who will care what I have to say?”

The fact is that there are vast forces at play, all of which have self-reinforcing systems. All of which resist people simply saying “enough is enough.”

Nonetheless, there is a path forward. My Torah commentary this week focused on the idea that our true path to redemption is not one laid by great national leaders. It is not one built on clans or tribes. No, our true path to redemption is the path of families. Of parents guarding children. Of cultural roots being sustained through the generations. Of little people – of nobodies – defining the threads of our societies.

So, from my family to those families that surround us: we don’t want war. We don’t want to send our sons and our daughters to fight. We don’t want them to die, and we don’t want them to kill your sons or your daughters. Our vision of a better future is just this: our families – yours and ours both – should each carryforward their values and their relationship to the timeless Almighty from generation to generation. Just as our vision does not call for your destruction, your vision should not call for ours.

In the East, our people have suffered pogroms and slaughters since the founding of Islam. Ninety-nine percent of our populations in the Arab world were ethnically cleansed in the years following the establishment of the State of Israel. In the West, we have witnessed a thousand years of oppression culminating in the Holocaust itself. And here, in Israel, we have suffered since the very establishment of our people in this place almost 3,000 years ago. Today we fight, but we are not eager to do more than we must to keep our enemies at bay. They wish to cleanse the land of the filth of the Jews, but we must resist being cleansed.

We are eager, always eager, to look to a hopeful future.

While Islam has 99 attributes of All-h, we have only 13 attributes of G-d. We are oddly poor at counting. The final eight are these (with my translation): “He establishes kindness for thousands of generations, lifting the burden of sin and transgression and acts of destruction. But His act of freedom will not free. The deserving weight of sin will rest on children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”

As we seek to walk in the path of G-d, this is our unilateral compact with the world. We will move on. We are no longer angry at the Germans, the Egyptians or the descendants of the Romans. We remember what happened, but our anger died with the generations that committed their sins against us. Instead, we remember and embrace the kindnesses – as illustrated by Yad Vashem’s dedication to the Righteous Among the Nations.

All we ask is this: you should remember the sins of your parents and grandparents to the third and fourth generation so that they need never be repeated. And we, who have also sinned, will do the same.

A plea from our family to yours

This is my interpretation of my wife’s plea. A plea to Lebanese. A plea to Palestinians. A plea to Iranians and Yeminites and even a plea to those in Israel who imagine some sort of national glory through war:

Stop imagining your glory. Stop pursuing your honor, your power or your wealth.
Stop pursuing the destruction of others.

Instead, seek only to carry forward your family’s connection to the timeless Almighty. Rid yourselves of those parts of your heritage that demand the destruction of others. Pass your relationship to G-d on to your children and allow us to do the same. Embrace kindness and let those who have embraced destruction live with their sins until their generations have washed it from their legacies.

Soldiers of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Yemen: lay down your arms, grow old and pass your legacy on to your children’s children, to the thousandth generation. If you do not fight us, if you do not attack us – we will ourselves stand down.

Such a plan may not be reasonable. It may not be realistic. But the nobodies of the world can make it real, nonetheless.

May we have a blessed week. May the memory of those children be preserved.

May we beat swords into plowshares and may we know war no more.

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Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash