Untitled

Untitled – it’s sort of like saying “speechless.” Superlatives are superfluous and synonyms synergetic, when one reality show supersedes another. Superlatives relinquish their meaning to sensations that preclude adjectives – and synonyms for those sensations generate alternative words to distinguish one sensation from another with each new piece of news.

That’s the best introduction I can come up with on this rainy Friday. Israeli media saved us from the visuals, no broadcasts of the Hamas celebration returning remains of four hostages. Reports of worldwide criticism. The Al-Jazeera YouTube channel and Facebook posts made pictures accessible, but I managed to avoid. Descriptions in the criticisms were vivid enough.

Before reports from Abu Kabir, Israel’s Institute for Forensic Medicine, dispelling Hamas claims that the children, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were killed by an Israeli air raid – and without further details stating they were brutally murdered – no bandwidth for imagining fake alternative statements in social media. When Abu Kabir announces the woman’s body is not their mother, Shiri, but the body of a Gazan woman – and Hamas confirms – who needs bandwidth? Interrupted thoughts about Oded Lifshitz (85), defender of Palestinian rights, slain in captivity by Gazan members of the Islamic Jihad – his remains returned yesterday too. Remind self: after the Shoah, grieving survivors rebuilt their lives and raised new families.

Yes, Palestinians – one from an outer professional circle, another an admired Facebook friend – unhesitatingly shared sympathies, sharing pain permeating Israeli society. It feels like they are painfully few. Unlike most people I know, immersed in relationships with Palestinians, I can feel the few, the reverberation of few – loud, resounding, rebounding, and the void where many voices are absent is not filled.

Consumed with wonder: what did Hamas achieve? Israel enabled Hamas for years, following erroneous conceptions. Israel refrained from finishing the job, so to speak, in retaliation for every round of attack over the years. You can claim Israel demolished Gaza, but what was the Hamas end game plan? What service did they provide the Palestinian people and its legitimate national demands for a state of its own? Consumed with wonder: what did Hamas achieve? More Jewish Israelis convinced all Palestinians are as evil as Hamas? More Palestinians prone to extremism after facing Israeli retaliation? More extremist voices legitimated.

The cycle spirals chaotically. Destined to collapse into dissolution, into its constituent elements, and I know there is so much goodness in this world, and so many good people in it; so much goodness and so many good people in the microcosm embracing me, so goodness will emerge. We will heal. The world will recover.

I know. Because this week a friend hugged me. Not just any hug, not just any friend. A friend of four decades who lives in northern Israel, so of course it’s been impossible for us to get together in the past 10 years, because life is busy, but one text message at the right moment on the right day and we met in Tel Aviv for coffee with a hug. In the middle of a mall, as we hugged and laughed and marveled at our friendship, she made the absurd and ever so trendy observation, that anyone watching us hug would think we were hostages. Hugs and hostages – an obvious association on a Sunday.

At the other end of the week, I met a friend never met in person, on Zoom. She lives in Berlin and her father lives in Jerusalem and though I have never met him either, like me, he is from Philadelphia. In the medley of connections that work and play have brought my way, we met in the past year. Her mother was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem 20 years ago. We discussed some marginal professional items, and spent most of an hour discussing Israel, Germany, the US, Nazism, national myths – called narratives, doing something and doing nothing and helplessness. Just because it’s not Shoah, doesn’t mean it’s not genocide. Pointless to compare, and whether quantitatively and/or qualitatively incomparable is inconsequential. It’s an identity issue and will have to be addressed. The veil has been removed from the myths of my youth.

Scene shift. Supermarket checkout line, glancing at my phone, news from the Forensic Medicine Center. Haim says something about the barbaric Hamas. A flash goes through my mind, about things some Israelis have done to Palestinians. I say nothing. In that moment, it isn’t about proving my empathy, it’s not about capacity for empathy. It’s just about allowing Haim to be consumed by that pain and being consumed with him. We know empathy is present, even if quiet in the moment. It doesn’t mean I silence it. It means I know it’s there and therefore doesn’t need saying. Not then. It means others have similar thoughts and someday the voices will join in a chaotic refrain that a synthesizer will capture, to make this world harmonious.

While the Berlin-Kfar Saba Zoom call, and our irrelevant generational age difference, pauses, how we judged history, vowed in different times and places that we would not be silent. And we are not, but are we anything but helpless?

For weeks we haven’t been awakened anywhere in Israel by air raid sirens in the middle of the night, nor jolted from our routines during the day, yet this week friends share nightmares that kept them awake, or if they slept, they report waking suddenly, to the darkness, to images of two little redheads and they can’t resume sleeping.

In what scenario is it forgivable that Bibi Netanyahu never visited Kibbutz Nir Oz after October 7? He shows the Bibas children’s pictures to the world but doesn’t show his face at the kibbutz. Legislation proposed this week to tax contributions to Israeli NGOs from foreign governments and partially government funded foundations. Projected outcome: relieve Israel’s government of demands by human rights and peacebuilding organizations.

Someday, friends won’t tell me and text me that they couldn’t sleep; they will write, “I slept through the night, dreaming about peace in the Middle East.” Nightmares pass, dreams come true, after confronting, as they will, a visual sequence of fleeting images destined for replacement.

Harriet Gimpel, February 21, 2025