This post arises from an email I received from a health/fitness/yoga/mindfulness site, offering a sentence that stopped me in my tracks: “In some ways, we have already entered a strange form of World War III, except the overwhelming majority of combatants are digital warriors.” Recognition. Sadness. Fear.
All here follows from listening to a (2:41 hr) podcast called Commune (with Jeff Krasno), “From Abraham to October 7th with Yoav Biller,” complemented with two podcasts overtly Palestinian in perspective, This is Palestine, particularly the episode from October 10th, 2023, and Dan Snow’s Israel and Palestine: a Palestinian Perspective with Yara Hawari, from 2021. I notice my own belly-anxiety arising as fractures loom in relationships that are important to me. Believing in the power of the word as ‘event’, I find myself here to lament, note, observe, wonder…
First: I rarely discuss anything Middle-East political, mostly because I value my relationships. I find this topic/area/history completely antagonistic across conversations with more than 2 people involved. It’s hard enough with two. Instead, I’ve lived with one aim: It’s a lot more complicated than we know. Therefore, I immediately distrust-distance from anyone with charged-and-strong convictions, unwilling to listen or get curious. Friends included. So this post is pushing the envelope for me…
Mostly, I’m feeling intense sadness and not a little fear amidst the storying-participation of well-meaning human beings triggered by so much within their/our bodies, much of it unconscious, much of it amidst (our always) incomplete healing journeys. I have appreciated the wisdom of one friend insisting that we cannot look away. I agree, so here I am. Simultaneously, I cringe at the bandying about of extra-contextual, excessively charged political terms–genocide, occupation, Zionism, right-of-return, indigenous, apartheid, settlement, etc.-- usually without much historical nuance or even interest, let alone curiosity (which Brene Brown calls “interest with an itch”). Hence, 2:41 hours of historical review from a pro-Palestinian/pro-Israeli guide. Hence seeking purely Palestinian voices, grief.
One, I’m noticing a familiar unconscious dynamic at work in so many I know: embedded anti-semitism, with absolutely no curiosity about this minority human community on earth. It’s not un-coincidential that many African-American students I’ve traveled with recognize a similarity with white supremacy in our white/European bodies. Except so much progressive advocacy for Palestinians arises out of a secularity, disdain & refusal of religious-ethnic expression of any kind, such that we cannot even imagine the anti-semitism embedded within us. Very few populations on the planet have been as persecuted as the Jews, even granting they had a historical head-start and colonial powers have decimated multiple human populations.
It’s also significant to me that the historical US alliance with Israel blinds so many of us to precisely the things “we” don’t want to admit about our own history: forcible removal of indigenous populations; embedded assumptions of whiteness; otherizing and dehumanizing those who challenge historical metanarratives we've held before.
We have met the enemy, Pogo has said…