Gaza Note

As I write this morning another Israeli assault into Gaza is in progress, triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel six months ago, marking yet another chapter in history following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. I was just four years old at the time so I have no memory of that, but by the time I was in sixth grade the "Gaza strip" was already in the news. That was the place where the indigenous populations went as formerly Palestinian towns and farms were taken over by Jewish newcomers to form a "Jewish homeland" in the aftermath of World War Two. 

This part of the world has been newsworthy as long as I can remember. When I first started blogging almost twenty years ago I made note of something that happened when I was in grade school.

In the Fifties I was in elementary school. I was lucky enough to have a teacher whose mother had taught my father when he was in elementary school. I don't think many people can say that. Anyway, she was an old maid type who had an old-fashioned way of teaching that helps you remember what she said. I recall once she got after another kid with "If you don't sit down and straighten up, I'm gonna hit you on your Gaza Strip! You know what that is, don't you? It's a Very. Critical. Area..." That was half a century ago and what she said is still correct. Gaza is still a very critical area.

Much of what I have read about how Palestinians are treated by Israel and the IDF reminds me of how black people were treated by white people when our family moved from Kentucky to Georgia in 1956, The social structure is called apartheid by most of the world, but to me it is just old-fashioned segregation.

Jews and Palestinians have a kind of symbiotic relationship. Palestinians living inside Israel where they have lived for generations, some of whom are Christians, are legal Israeli citizens. They come and go more or less freely, operate businesses and even have separate court systems.

Most Americans have no idea there are Sharia courts in Israel, although their judges are selected by the Knesset. But I get the sense that Palestinian Israelis "know their place" and rarely stray where they are unwelcome.

I still recall how surprised I was to see white men driving thru town with a black woman in the back seat. They were transporting maids to and from their homes for the day because lots of white homemakers had black service workers to cook, keep house, help with the laundry, child-care, etc. In many cases there was (and still is for some) a genuine affection for "the help". That movie "Driving Miss Daisy" was really quite accurate.

These are the flashbacks I have when I think of how Palestinians and Israelis live together.

Remembering Covid -- a Memorial Thread

Four years ago today, I walked into the apocalypse.

Crossing the line in the ER felt like entering a whole other world.

Frenetic alarms.

Patients strewn about, struggling to breathe.

Too few staff. Too many deaths.

Covid was everything.

It had completely taken over our ER 

Covid inundated NYC a week prior.

And many of our staff fell ill.

Especially the nurses.

We had only a fraction of those we needed.

Too few to notice when the oxygen tanks under patients’ beds ran out.

So we did something kinda insane.

Actually unbelievable 

We ran tubing from the oxygen outlets on the wall

up, up, up

then through the ceiling

and then dangled it down to the middle of the ER

All over the ER

So everyone could get a reliable oxygen supply

And not suffocate when their tank ran out

It saved lives.

A lot.

A lot. 

But not all

“Hey, who has the guy in room 7”

—“Oh, me”

“He’s dead”

Keep going.

Others would die the same shift. 

Hundred died that day in NYC from Covid

The worse was still in front of us

A week later, 815 died. In one city.

Morgues were over capacity.

Walk by trucks set up outside the hospital for the overflow.

More staff fell ill.

They couldn’t get tested. Still. 

Four years ago, we had no idea what would happen next.

How long it would last

Or who would be next

Would it be as bad in Chicago?

LA?

Detroit?

Phoenix, Cheyenne, or Pensacola?

We know how it played out now

We knew nearly nothing then

We didn’t know 

Today, many will tell you we overreacted then

But you’ll never hear that from someone, anyone who worked in the hospital then

Covid scarred a generation of healthcare workers

Many watched their colleagues suffer.

Struggle to breathe.

Then die. 

Mistakes were made.

Politics became paramount.

We all paid the price.

But until the day I die

No one can tell me…

The things I saw

The things we

All those on the frontline

Witnessed and endured

We’re not real

We’re not the worst things we will

EVER see 

The past is being rewritten

But none of us who witnessed those early days can scrub our memories of the pain, and horror

We’ll never forget finding young, otherwise healthy people dead in a chair

And we’ll never forget our colleagues who died

You might.

But we won’t. 

Forgiveness Note

In the middle of the night, surfing the web looking for something else, I came across something I wrote and forgot in 2008. These reflections about forgiveness may some day be helpful for someone struggling to forgive someone or come to terms with injustice to themselves or others about which they know. Forgiveness is the most challenging of all Christian ideas.

I finally got around to following up this comment thread. Thanks for the promo!

You raise the central question: Should one forgive in the midst of the ongoing unrepentant practice of evil?

If we use Christ as our model his dying words suggest exactly that. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Thankfully I no longer work for him, but for nearly twenty-seven years I was subordinate to one of the meanest men in the company for which we worked. Without going into detail, it is sufficient to say that he was known by one and all to be insulting, sarcastic, abusive and unaccountably indifferent to the feelings of others. He kept his job because he was knowledgeable and well-organized...and his father was well-placed. Anyway, at one particularly stressful point a sympathetic customer who knew the situation said something helpful: "It will build your faith," she said. And she was correct.

I thought about that a lot as the years went by, and I had to forgive this man, sometimes several times a day, for what he said and did. In time I came to feel sorry for him, much the same way one feels sorry for any of God's pitiful creatures. I learned in time actually to defend him when talking about him with others, despite his ungrateful, relentless verbal and psychological abuse. (It was some comfort knowing that he was not just picking on me. He was that way to everyone at one time or another, scapegoating or insulting them for situations over which they had no control.)

You put your finger on the dynamic in your post. We forgive, not because of what forgiveness does for the perpetrator, but for what it does for us. When we fail to forgive we get infected with a corrosive, septic spiritual condition that poisons everything in life. All our senses are affected, and we can no longer hear, see, feel or experience life without distortion. For me, it is the same dynamic that makes me oppose capital punishment. The reason has more to do with what it does to me than what happens to the criminal. In the same way that capital punishment caused me as a citizen to become a perpetrator of evil, unforgiveness also transforms me into someone I know I don't want to be.

It's easier said than done, of course. But that's the best I can do in a comment thread.

I wrote about Leila Abu Saba at my first blog if anyone cares to know the backstory. She died of cancer shortly after this was written but thankfully some of her writing remains accessible, including this link to one of her several blogs.   This post is not linked to my social media platforms because some of my friends from the past will recognize the person about whom I wrote and I want to avoid conflict.

Without Equality There's No Freedom

This story appeared in my "X" feed and received many moving responses.

Alon Mizrahi | without equality there's no freedom

Let me share with one of the most surreal and sobering moments of my life, that happened to me while I was an IDF soldier stationed in Gaza in at the end of 1992. That kind of moment could only happen to a Mizrahi, or Arab-jewish soldier. You'll see why I say it. And I could swear to you that every word of it is true. No embellishments, no filling in missing pieces of memory. All truth. - In the summer of 1992 I finished basic and some advanced infantry training, and my platoon was ready to partake in combat function, which really was just (same as for generation of young Israeli men and women before and after that) enforcement of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The unit I was joining at this stage had under its responsibility (for purposes of overt occupation activities) the Al-Shati refugee camp and some of the adjacent Rimal neighborhood, on the northwestern part of the Strip. At the end of 1992, Israel's leadership decided that the (Zionist and brilliant) solution for the growing discontent, or resistence, in the Strip, was removing 400 Hamas 'leaders' from Gaza and sending them into exile in Lebanon. As many of those Hamas figures lived in and around the area designated for my unit to handle, we were appointed with making dozens of arrests, or maybe hundreds (Israel would always arrest additional people for more information, as a form of pressure and to prevent an eruption of a violent reaction). For weeks in November of 1992 I would spend whole nights of my very young life walking from house to house in the dead of night in Gaza, knocking on doors, threatening family members of missing wanted people and handing over those who were home to the representatives of the security services, who were always with us, and always in plain cloths. As part of my service there, I was in hundreds of Palestinians homes in Gaza, many of them during that month of endless nocturnal search and arrest hours. Some nights we would take in 10 different people from same numbers of homes. - I was too young and shocked to understand anything, though it was clear to me that this was not the hero's service fighting evil I spent the months and years before joining the IDF hoping for and fantasizing about. Those people in Gaza were normal in a way that no part of me could align with evil. And I could never bring myself to become that natural lord and master that colonial and racist regimes always expect their soldiers and cops to be. I was too soft. - The people we took in never cried, begged for forgiveness or claimed it was a mistake. They would climb up and sit in the military vehicle with their hands tied behind their backs and their eyes covered in a kind of quiet that was more thunderous, more painful for me to remember all those years later, than any other act would be. - One man in particular I remember. A big, sombre man in his 30', who looked untouchable in a big, thick black coat. But as he sat in the military vehicle with his hands tied behind his back his coat slipped over his shoulders, revealing a tank top and a body and skin that did not look invincible, or untouchable. He was human. And he sat there, staring into space, in total quiet. Back then I had no idea where these men were taken, and what was going to be unleashed upon them. Only many years later did I discover how extensive Israel's use of torture was, and how horrible.

But the big, somber, fragile man sat there, quiet, and, like any other Palestinian I saw in this situation, with what I can best describe as dignity in brokenness, that was astonishing. I have never seen anyone with more dignity in my life than a hand-tied, eyes-covered Palestinian detainee. - Towards the end of those weeks of knocking on doors and arresting people, one morning, around 7AMm after a long long bight, that moment happened to me. It was something that I never forgot and never will forget. It was the last arrest for that night, which already becade day. We stood there, a small band of soldiers, and knocked on the door of what looked like a well built, well kept house. It was not fancy, but it surely not the house of poor people. We waited for someone to come and open the door. After a minute or so, someone did. If you ever felt like reality around you had its fundamentals twisting and changing, or like the layer of meaning that enveloped reality was torn, revealing another layer of deeper meaning, but in a way that makes you dizzy and dumbfounded - if you know that feeling you'll know what I went through that moment. Because the person that opened that door at that house that morning in Gaza was my very own and only sister. The door opened and the actual, precise, living and breathing image of my sister, identical as any identical twin ever was, stood in the doorway. It was her face. her expression, her hair, her highet, her age, her build, her movement, her skin tone accurate to the 1000th degree. I didn't know what was going on, or what kind of insane trick was being played on me. I gasped, lost for words. I stood a meter away from her, and my very wanted to call her by my sister's name. - Not long after this, after that whole period, I started cracking. I could not take it anymore, though I never could tell myself what it was that I couldn't take. I went to see a psychologist and got restationed to a non-combat unit. It took me many years to start to appreciate the damage done to me by what I was sent to do and see in Gaza. I don't think that even today I have completely processed it. - She stood at the door and was a little puzzled, bot not panicked. She was wiping the floor, and it was still wet. A bucket with a rug in it stood by. It was a clean house, with a shining clean floor. The officer told her to get out and speak to us from street level, as the house was one stair up from that. But the street was dirty and sandy, and she couldn't bring herself to step outside barefoot. Her foot (my sister's foot) ventured out for a second, not actually stepping, just hovering, but then was drawn in. The officer pretended to not notice. He didn't insist, and she remained inside. By not insisting and not becoming violent, I think, he saved my actual sanity, and never knew it.

The Tame Geese -- A parable by Søren Kierkegaard

This is a backup copy of something I blogged over a decade ago that was lost in my memory, not to mention that the link has also since gone dark.

The Tame Geese -- A parable by Søren Kierkegaard (by Søren Kierkegaard, from A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited by Robert Bretall, p. 433)

Suppose it was so that the geese could talk — then they had so arranged it that they also could have their religious worship, their divine service. 

Every Sunday they came together, and once of the ganders preached. 

The essential content of the sermon was: what a lofty destiny the geese had, what a high goal the Creator (and every time this word was mentioned the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese; by the aid of wings they could fly away to distant regions, blessed climes, where properly they were at home, for here they were only strangers.

So it was every Sunday. And as soon as the assembly broke up each waddled home to his own affairs. And then the next Sunday again to divine worship and then again home — and that was the end of it. 

That was the end of it. For though the discourse sounded so lofty on Sunday, the geese on Monday were ready to recount to one another what befell a goose that had wanted to make serious use of the wings the Creator had given him, designed for the high goal that was proposed to him — what befell him, what a terrible death he encountered. This the geese could talk about knowingly among themselves. But, naturally, to speak about it on Sundays was unseemly; for, said they, it would then become evident that our divine worship is really only making a fool of God and of ourselves. 

Among the geese there were, however, some individuals which seemed suffering and grew thin. About them it was currently said among the geese: There you see what it leads to when flying is taken seriously. For because their hearts are occupied with the thought of wanting to fly, therefore they become thin, do not thrive, do not have the grace of God as we have who therefore become plump and delicate. 

And so the next Sunday they went again to divine worship, and the old gander preached about the high goal the Creator (here again the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed the head) had set before the geese, whereto the wings were designed. 

So with the divine worship of Christendom…

And a commentary...

Why didn't the geese fly?

After hearing and understanding such a powerful message about the opportunities available to them, they seemed to ignore it. They didn't fly home. The message made no impact on their lives. They continued to do what they had always done. They waddled home.

Why, when there were so many good reasons to change, didn't the geese fly?

It seems a part of the human condition that we don't always do what we know we should. We don't always act in our own best interest, even when we know better. In fact, we sometimes even deliberately do things that we know we are going to end up paying for in the long run. We might call this phenomenon the Amazing Action Anomaly. That is, people most often know what it is they should be doing but usually choose to ignore or act in contradiction to either their strongest instincts or to reality. Although, it makes no sense, we continue to waddle.