Not Yet Time

When Europe reached the Peace of Westphalia, in sixteen forty-eight, it was coming out of thirty years in which Catholics and Protestants had taken up arms to force their neighbors to believe as they did, and it had learned, from the burned villages whose bells had already been melted down into cannon, that a man certain he knew the will of God felt entitled to reduce to ashes anyone who disagreed. The men who signed the treaties at Münster and Osnabrück were simply worn out from burying the dead, and from that exhaustion they drew the modest, revolutionary idea that a neighbor might pray wrongly and go on living all the same.

By then, for a century and a half, on the other side of the ocean, men with the cross in one hand and smallpox in the other had swept across a continent that held at least sixty million people when they landed, where Tenochtitlán rose from a lake with its markets and aqueducts, several times the size of Madrid and as large as Paris or Constantinople. They called it a discovery, and a century after their arrival the land lay silent, with only six million where sixty million had lived before, and today, five centuries on, after we white men out of Europe took the Americas from one end to the other, the indigenous number around fifty million, less than a tenth of those who live in them. The slave trade was born of the same caravels, and for more than three centuries ships carried Africans packed into their holds, their skin branded with a hot iron by those who sold them as things, until the United States needed a war that killed more than six hundred thousand soldiers before it would admit, late, what the child whipped in the fields had always known, that it was a whole human being.

In the Paris of seventeen ninety-four, that same certainty swore liberty, equality, and fraternity and, in the name of those three words, kept a guillotine working nearly every day in the squares of the city, sending its own comrades to the scaffold, and it stopped only when the blade came down on the neck of Robespierre, who had called terror an emanation of virtue. Between eighteen eighty-five and nineteen oh eight, the vast territory of the Congo belonged to Leopold the Second, king of the Belgians, as a private estate he never once visited, and there the Force Publique cut off the hands of anyone who failed to bring in enough rubber and carried them in baskets to the posts, where the officers counted them the way a farmer tallies a harvest. In nineteen fifteen, the Young Turk government set the Armenians of the empire on the road to the deserts of Syria, on a march designed so that they would not arrive, and to this day Turkey refuses to give what was done its name.

In January of nineteen forty-five, the gates of Auschwitz opened before Soviet soldiers who had crossed half a ruined Europe and still had no word for what they found. Six million of my people were murdered in an industrial process by the country of Goethe, of Kant, and of Beethoven.

Almost four years later, in Paris, the United Nations adopted a declaration whose first article holds that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, a text drafted by a commission chaired by Franklin Roosevelt’s widow. From nineteen sixty-four to nineteen seventy-three, her country dropped more bombs on Laos than had fallen on Germany and Japan together in the Second World War, nearly a ton for every inhabitant of a kingdom whose neutrality Washington had promised to respect at Geneva two years earlier, all of it hidden from American voters, and the bombs that failed to go off still kill children half a century later. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge grew among the craters that the same air force was opening in Cambodia, emptied Phnom Penh in April of nineteen seventy-five, killed close to a quarter of the population, and, overthrown in nineteen seventy-nine, kept the country’s seat at the United Nations for years. Hafez al-Assad razed Hama with its residents inside in February of nineteen eighty-two and built the new city over the dead, whom for years no one dared to count. The warnings of the Rwanda slaughter reached New York in nineteen ninety-four while it was happening, and the reinforcements the Security Council approved did not set foot in Kigali until the machetes had stopped. Srebrenica had Dutch blue helmets inside when the men and the boys were separated from the women and shot, and General Ratko Mladić did not hear his genocide sentence in The Hague until twenty-two years later.

In every one of these places the extremist advanced as long as there were people to cheer him and people for him to devour, while the prudent kept repeating all around that it was not yet time, that the moment called for calm, that answering with force would mean stooping to his level, and only when the bodies had piled up did the society wake to what it had allowed, give the crime a name, topple the idol, open the courts, and swear never again. These belated reactions are what I call the turns, the moment when a people at last corrects its course and halts what it has set in motion, and every time they arrived exhausted, with the cemeteries already full.

In May of nineteen forty-eight, seven months before the declaration in Paris, our Declaration of Independence promised complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants, without distinction of religion, race, or sex, and called on the Arab inhabitants of our new state to take part in building it as full and equal citizens. Thirty-six years later, Meir Kahane entered our Knesset with some twenty-six thousand votes, with a physician named Baruch Goldstein third on his list, and with bills to strip non-Jews of their citizenship and to forbid them to marry or have relations with Jews. Each time he took the podium, the other members rose and walked out of the chamber, and he spoke to empty seats, heard only by the presiding officer and the stenographer. In nineteen eighty-five, our Knesset passed Amendment Number Nine to the Basic Law, which added Section Seven A and barred from the elections any list that incited to racism, a law written to keep Kahane out of the chamber, and one that today is invoked to try to bar the Arab parties. In October of nineteen eighty-eight, our Central Elections Committee invoked that amendment and barred the party for incitement to racism. At the end of February of nineteen ninety-four, the doctor from that list walked into the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron, during the morning prayer and killed twenty-nine Muslims, and only then, less than a month later, did our government outlaw the party as a terrorist organization, a turn made with the dead already buried. Those twenty-six thousand were treated as a national disgrace, a party the chamber emptied out and the law expelled, and today they are more than half a million, and no one rises to leave the room anymore.

Itamar Ben-Gvir had joined that party at sixteen, and at nineteen, in October of nineteen ninety-five, he appeared on our television with the emblem torn from Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac and warned that, having reached the car, they would reach its owner too, and a few weeks later Rabin was dead. He kept Goldstein’s portrait on his living-room wall, in Kiryat Arba, until the day the picture began to complicate his life, and in two thousand seven he was convicted of incitement to racism and of support for a terrorist organization after carrying at a demonstration a sign according to which Kahane was right and the Arab members of our Knesset were a fifth column. In July of two thousand fifteen, settlers set fire to the house of the Dawabsheh family in the village of Duma, in an attack that killed the baby Ali, eighteen months old, and, in the weeks that followed, his father and mother, and that December Ben-Gvir, already lawyer to one of the suspects, was among the guests at the wedding where young men danced with weapons and stabbed a photograph of Ali. This man now commands our police, charged with investigating arsons like the one in Duma, and as minister he encouraged the mass distribution of handguns to Jewish civilians. On the eve of the October twenty-seventh election, he is demanding the defense ministry, promising to direct personally, at a meeting every week, the departure of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and assuring us that sixty per cent of them want to leave.

The idea on that sign reached the podium of our Knesset in October of two thousand twenty-one, out of the mouth of Bezalel Smotrich, who shouted at the Arab members that they were there only by mistake because Ben-Gurion had not finished the job of expelling them in forty-eight. The man who spat that at lawmakers elected by our fellow citizens now collects, as our finance minister, the taxes of the very families he wants on the other side of the border, and also runs the civil administration that decides which Palestinian house in the West Bank comes down. In February of two thousand twenty-three, a Palestinian gunman killed two brothers from the settlement of Har Bracha, Hallel Yaniv, twenty-one, who had just finished his service in our navy, and Yagel, nineteen, as they sat in traffic on the road that runs through Huwara. That night, hundreds of settlers stormed the town in their name and set houses and cars ablaze in front of our soldiers, who did not intervene, and before dawn Sameh Aqtash, thirty-seven years old, was dead. While the town burned, the Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech posted a photograph of herself at the entrance to Huwara and said she had come to support the protests, and the next morning her fellow party member Zvika Fogel told Army Radio that he looked on it all very favorably, both of them from Ben-Gvir’s party. The head of our Central Command, General Yehuda Fox, called the night a pogrom, the word our people learned to fear in the villages of the czars’ empire. Three days later, Smotrich declared that Huwara needed to be wiped out and that our state should do the job, and, when Washington called the remark repugnant, he said only that he had chosen his words poorly.

In the West Bank the job goes on this year at six attacks a day, a pace the UN had never before recorded, and the armed men who carry it out put up an unauthorized outpost beside a hamlet of Bedouin shepherds, turn their flocks loose on its pastures, cut off its water, and destroy its olive trees until the families fold their tents and leave. Since the beginning of two thousand twenty-three, forty-eight Palestinian communities have been left entirely empty and more than six thousand four hundred people have lost their homes to attacks and the closures that come with them, and in January the largest such exodus in three years emptied Ras Ein al-Auja, a Bedouin village of six hundred. We call these terrorists settlers, we call the younger ones Hilltop Youth, which sounds like a summer camp, and we save the word terrorist for whoever kills on the other side of the fence. The human rights office of the United Nations, in Geneva, points out that forcibly transferring the population of an occupied territory is a war crime, and the dictionary calls it ethnic cleansing.

In August of two thousand twenty-four, our prime minister received a letter from Ronen Bar, then the head of our internal security agency, in which he said he was seized with pain and great fear, as a Jew and as an Israeli, before the Jewish terror of the Hilltop Youth, warned that calling it nationalist crime was not enough because its aim was to spread fear, and added that the light hand of the police and a sense of secret backing were making it all worse; Ben-Gvir’s answer was to demand that Bar be fired. Netanyahu voted to dismiss him in March of two thousand twenty-five, and on the fifteenth of June Bar left the post, after thirty-five years of service. Three months earlier, our defense minister, Israel Katz, had ended administrative detention for settlers, which remained in force for Palestinians, and in January of two thousand twenty-five, when the hostage deal was about to open the cells of Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorism, he released the settlers still held and explained that it was better to see the settlers’ families happy than the families of the terrorists about to be freed. In June of that year, after our army had arrested some of them, dozens of settlers attacked our soldiers with pepper spray outside a base near Ramallah and set fire to a surveillance installation that had cost millions, and the six the police took away that night were sent home to house arrest before the smoke had cleared, while the army itself admits that settlers like them walk out of house arrest and past their restraining orders without anything happening to them.

Three years ago today, Hamas terrorists crossed the Gaza fence on the morning of the festival of the Rejoicing of the Torah, killed some twelve hundred of our own, three hundred and sixty-four of them young people dancing at the Nova festival, near Kibbutz Re’im, and carried off two hundred and fifty-one hostages, the youngest of them Kfir Bibas, nine months old, who came back in a coffin sixteen months later, beside his brother Ariel, four years old, and their mother, Shiri. The war that followed left Gaza in rubble and more than seventy-three thousand dead by the count of the territory’s health ministry, more than thirteen hundred of them after the ceasefire of last October, and neither the massacre of our own, nor the ruin of Gaza, nor the funerals we have held since then were enough for us to make the turn. Twenty days before the election, the polling average gives eight seats to Ben-Gvir’s party and six to the list Smotrich now shares with Moshe Feiglin, a former Likud member, who in June of two thousand twenty-four quoted Hitler on a Channel 12 panel to say that we cannot live here as long as a single Islamo-Nazi remains in Gaza. Kahane’s twenty-six thousand votes have become more than half a million.

We tell ourselves that the Supreme Court will save us, that the institutions will hold, that between the man demanding the defense ministry and the man quoting Hitler on a television panel there is still a distance that protects us, and we go on burying our own and counting the votes the way one checks the butcher’s bill, certain that we, we alone, of all the peoples who have ever stood in this exact place, will be the ones history spares.

The turn will come, but it is not yet time. Only after more blood has been shed.