Peace through aggression? A stairway to hell!
This year, just listening to the shofar made me cry. I heard the cries of starving children, suffering hostages, our young soldiers heading to their deaths, and our bleeding country. As Shakespeare aptly wrote,
‘I think our country sinks beneath the yoke.
It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds.’
It was the words I heard on Erev Rosh Hashana that I really could not eradicate from my heart. A conversation with two intelligent, Israeli citizens: We believe in peace. And yet it can only be reached through aggression.
I was knocked for six.
I rewound this in my head.
We believe in peace, but we need to kill all the Arabs to get there.
Perhaps, I thought, perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps that’s not what she meant.
And then the second blow came swiftly after the first. ‘I have a lot of Arab friends, but if push came to shove, I know they would kill me.’
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I travelled back from their house in the West Bank with a heavy heart. It’s all very well, living in the north, with all our Arab friends, working for peace left right and centre, trusting each other as fully as we trust our kin, but if this is the attitude of much of the country, or even, half of the country, where does that leave us?
When I told a very beloved friend, she held me close while I was crying. But she also said, you have to understand, after the 7th October, it’s hard for some people to trust again. Sometimes even me.
I remember how I felt when I came out of the Nova exhibition in Tel Aviv, which captured the last minutes of the party before hell came down to earth. And when I watched the film ‘We will dance again’ with its footage of the slaughter from Hamas’ own phones. In the few seconds after each experience, I wanted to kill. I wanted to destroy. To wipe out. To get revenge.
But revenge on whom?
Revenge only feels good for a very limited amount of time. Many people I know ran out of that ‘satisfied’ feeling a long time ago, when the pictures of bleeding, starving and dying children started to appear all over social media.
But not, or so it seems, those who find it impossible to trust ‘the Arabs’. Naturally, it is those same people who do not go out of their way to find Arabs who are working for peace, who want it with all their heart and who are prepared to die for it (as some already have). It is the same old adage, around for at least two thousand years, according to the Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus: ‘It is not possible to learn what you think you already know.’
These people know we cannot trust the Arabs. These people know peace is only possible through war. These people want to kill the Arabs before the Arabs kill us.
It’s all very well working for peace, with peace loving, peace aspiring, peace inspiring people. But how do we change the view of thousands and thousands of Jews who will not look beyond their own narrative?
The truth is, I don’t know. I guess none of us do. I guess that is one of the reasons Benjamin Netanyahu continues to make this suffering country bleed itself dry.
