The guns were there all along

The writer Anton Chekov famously wrote that if you produce a gun in act one of a play, it must go off before the final scene. The IDF has been that gun in our ongoing drama. The tanks and soldiers amassed on the border have been ready, perched on the scenery, cocked and waiting for the slightest trigger. We knew, without knowing, without wanting to know, they would go off in a terrible spectacle following the short intermission.

The tragedy we are caught in is as dark as any demented playwright might have dreamed up. Before the lights briefly rose in the theater, we had some shred of hope for a happy ending. Now, with the setting moving from war front to graveyard, we understand the full depth of the catastrophe that is about to unfold, and we will be glued to our seats and or watching from our safe rooms until the bitter end.

The first acts were full of misdirection. We were told, the main characters looking directly at the audience, that the enemy was all but vanquished, unable to resume fighting and willing to cede control.

Now, as the first rattling explosions mark the second act, the same characters are telling us there are 30,000 enemy fighters, armed and ready for battle. Is this a new misdirection; are we meant to not trust our ears, or are their further “truths” still to unfold?

We notice the play has changed in unsubtle ways; the understudies have stepped in and are reading their lines from scripts, and the king, who is visibly going mad, is off-script one moment and repeating act-one soliloquies in the next. The result is Lear through Marvel comics, including a big orange character who grimaces horribly and repeats “There’ll be hell to pay.” We have gone from byzantine to crude, from parroting platitudes about self-defense to text-bubble threats that the new incursion will be “unlike anything they have seen before.”

And as we try to keep track of the changing faces, we also struggle to fathom the treachery at the center of this drama. The king, it seems, entered into a pact and is now refusing to honor that pact. He has dispensed his honorable, though tainted, generals and replaced them with feeble spies. The people rend their clothing and weep for their children.

As the scenes begin to unfold, the new bloodshed makes us gasp and cry out. Because just before the break, we had experienced the “play-within-a-play” of hostages walking free and rejoining their families. Its sweet taste was still on our tongues when the second act began without warning. We cry because, somehow, we had taken at face value the idea that the thousands of dead in the first act were necessary; but the new killing seems overly gratuitous, overly gruesome. We cry because, in returning to war we are forfeiting the lives of the remaining hostages and endangering soldiers. We cry because the end was in sight, but it turned out to be a devious plot twist devised by our demented playwright. We cry because we realize, with a sharp prick, that the horrors of October 7 are used as a perpetual excuse for the continued slaughter of  Palestinians, innocents and combatants alike.

The tragedy here is that our crazed king, by his own treachery, has created a situation in which permanent war is the only way for him to outlast his ultimate fate. We know, without knowing, that further treachery is afoot. We hope, without believing in spirits, that the ghosts of every hostage murdered in captivity haunts him in his sleep.

We, the chorus in this drama — for we cannot count ourselves mere spectators – are rallying ourselves to sing, again, and again and again, of those who died because a demented king, a cartoonish, grasping overlord, and a black-clad army that springs to new life as soon as it has been decimated have rendered a peaceful ending all but impossible.

We, the chorus, will continue to sing our opposition, because the end is not foretold (see my previous post on the difference between hope and optimism). We will sing until the end, because we refuse to accept it when we are told that war and death are necessary. We will sing for the peaceful solutions that are within grasp, if the above players would only dare to grasp them. We refuse to follow the king down his path to madness.

I refuse.