“They Were Annihilated Once” – Choose Love
I admit that I have never found Pride activities to be particularly enjoyable, nor have I found a queer community to be a good fit most times. And at times I’ve unfortunately loathed the queer community, often out of totally invalid grievances stemming from my own pain and feeling out of place. However, I’ve slowly learned to love the queer community and realize my place in it simply wasn’t where I was looking. It took meeting someone who challenged my self-perception through love and desire for me to realize I’d taken a narrow view of myself, even though I knew that I’d wanted to see a certain balance all along. Relating to ourselves makes it easier to relate to others and a bit more difficult to hate.
This isn’t about my struggle to escape the hyper-masculine and hyperfeminine confines of gender our society has created. It’s about an intolerant sentiment I hear too often from other Jews, especially fellow Zionists, an attitude that I know lacks historical perspective. Seeing that viewpoint in Israel used to scare me, now I worry moreso that it doesn’t just represent the same unreasonable hate that it does in other countries and is instead a harbinger of something deeper that’s threatening to fracture Israeli society. It’s easy to dismiss criticism from the Diaspora, yet this is a concern based in seeing a parallel here in the United States and in a history too taboo to invoke comparison with.
Despite that, I’m going to try and explain the parallel with some nuance, since I hope we’re past calling each other capos over disagreements. And I’m sure you see where I’m going with this, so let me be clear that I’m not saying that Americans or Israelis are Nazis like Gustavo Petro has clumsily implied. Rather, what I see is a vacuum of leadership, communication, and unity that lets the coercive, violent, and power-hungry step into the breach behind a banner of leadership.
Someone said something recently and I don’t know if he was Jewish or not, but it illustrated the problem perfectly, “they were annihilated once; it seems like the time has come to annihilate again,” stating a potential intent to attack participants in Israel’s Pride month. That statement is not an uncommon sentiment, and if we recontextualize it to think of him as speaking about Jews it’s an all too familiar sentiment especially since October 7th. He is not speaking of Jews, but of queer people; except that inevitably the harm he would have caused would also almost certainly have been to Jews primarily although not exclusively. In bringing up the rise of fascism in germany, my point is simply this: targeting the queer community leads to targeting Jews.
That’s both how the attacks on the German queer community normalized and thus enabled attacks on Jews, the process of enabling the normalization of violence against one ‘Other’ and then another. Yet what happens when that hatred and divisiveness arises in Jewish society? Firstly it becomes grist for antizionists and dulls Israel’s qualitative moral edge against countries like Iran that actively and violently persecute their queer community, which is why statements like these are taken so seriously. Where the Prime Minister could once quip paternalistically about Chickens for KFC, one might make an equally crass statement about Crabs for Red Lobster if hatred like this becomes normalized. As unfair as that comparison currently is, allowing ourselves any hate and condemnation of the queer community is self-defeating. Not only does it look awful, not only is hate a painful motivation to bear, it’s even moreso a distraction from real threats to Israel’s existence.
It’s also a distraction from real internal harms and real internal lapses in safety. A liability in the country where citizens betray Israel for pittances, without even an ideological motivation, though often in some kind of apathetic and greedy boredom. Communal harms have been allowed to fester in silence while fellow citizens plot misdirected violence. This is not the lapse that Hamas exploited on October 7th, it is a compromise and integrity of the Nation while already divided and beset.
The queer community never deserved my enmity, and still this is not a mea culpa nor an attempt at recompense. It’s a reflection on how hate and accusations weakness from within on both the societal and individual level. Israel is a society of paradoxes and communities with no apparent commonality but the land. That doesn’t have to be weakness, it can be a strength. The first step is to acknowledge even when it’s costly, one part of society cannot nor should it dictate the way other parts live. Then we must see that instead of these differences being a challenge to rightness, diversity that’s a prerequisite for renewing the exhausted resilience that has already been overtaxing so many people, people who are already quietly and resiliently breaking.
The weakness need not exist, the memory of strength can always return to being present strength, yet the foundations that turn disparate parts of society into a functional whole are in need of repair. Mending the integrity of a divided society and returning to resilience and strength is not easy, yet a common sentiment of Pride is the bond we need both in Israel and the Diaspora, “Love wins.”
Love wins where annihilation fails. Yes, we have to face our own arrogances, insecurities, wounds disguised as blame and anger, projections and other misattributions, and always choose love. Choose love even when understanding fails. Each time we choose to be in opposition instead of for each other it opens up chasms beneath us each time we choose to challenge instead of choosing love, it’s we who fall into those chasms and not the people we hate. Even when we think we have a good reason to hate someone, when we approach another with hate it’s self-undermining. I know better than most how hard it is to let go of the resentments that create hatred, which has taught me that each resentment we hold on to brings us lower instead of lifting us up.
Often it’s hard to see that we aren’t choosing love because we’re acting in fear. We think we’re protecting our safety and our happiness, yet what we’re really doing is denying them the space and energy they need. Fear has ruled my life and still in years of joy for me. I find myself at a low ebb, doubting myself in any possibility for love and happiness in my own life. Not for being queer, but from having acted fearful and perceived life fearfully. Even as I set each piece of fear and the anger that masks it aside, I still see a chasm between myself and love; I created that chasm with my own pain, otherwise I would already have the love I’ve wanted for most of the war. A war that is supposedly ending now; may peace come as unlikely as it seems especially after everything that has happened in war and how little has happened in diplomacy.
Instead, my internal battles became a No Man’s Land between her and I. This same pain plays out on a bigger level and makes living as one people as hard as living as one household when love is replaced by fear. So choose love, love wins where annihilation fails. You see, “they” we’re not annihilated “once”. It has never been just once, it has been many times. And it has never been annihilation so much as one tragedy after another. Instead of choosing fear let the reality of tragedy open our hearts. Face those fears, set them aside, and choose love. Straight or queer, religious or not, regardless of politics; love is what will allow us to win while retaining and celebrating our differences.
You don’t have to go to Pride or go to religious services to love one another, all you have to do is accept that what’s different about them is okay even if that means getting uncomfortably real about why it feels anything but okay. Sometimes you are what you fear, sometimes you’re just afraid that you might be out of a fear that you aren’t enough yourself, or maybe a pain you carry is misattributed to people who have no interest in hurting anyone. If you feel hurt by them simply further existence, your hurt is coming from inside of you.
And to win that internal battle you can’t fight. If you fight the pain inside it becomes new pain. Love, stop fighting yourself by fighting others, and let go of the pain. That’s not an easy change, maybe your internal war is extensive, with years of history and many fronts; nonetheless, it’s inside of you and not outside in any other person. Choosing love is not a one-time choice, it’s not always an easy choice, it is the only choice that frees anyone enlightens the burdens they carry. Hate and anger motivate, they do not create, and they do deplete us. That is why love wins, since over time more is created than any amount of hate has ever annihilated.
This post is dedicated to the one who freed my heart and to a whole peace, with happiness for all.
