I was going to comment yesterday, but I decided to give it a day. I think you are very brave for posting on the politics of something that I think has affected us all, including me as a Jewish mother and mother of Jewish children. I work with victims of genocide and on issues of human rights, and I have so many feelings all over the place on this one. My strongest feeling is that no child should ever be buried; no parent should ever have to bury her child. Never. Under any conditions. I feel that way for Gazans, for Israelis, for Sudanese, for Saudi Arabian, for Chinese -- I don't care whom. The universality we all share is a love for our children. I also know that the issue of Israel and Palestine is long and complicated, and support for Israel does not mean that we cannot also fight for two states and let Palestinians live in their own state in peace. That is what I want. However, even if Israel leaves Gaza, that will not happen. Hamas is a terrorist organization, not a government, not freedom fighters. Palestinians have been offered their own country multiple times over the past 70+ years, including as recently as 20 years ago, and they walked away. Instead, they elected a terrorist organization to govern them, and that organization has funneled money that could be use to lift up the people of Palestine into weapons, tunnels, and the support of their leaders who live the good life in Qatar. They have torn down the infrastructure Israel had built there for the betterment of the Palestinian people when Israel left in 2005. And they have despotically harmed the very Palestinian people the group purports to support. Women, LGBTQ+, and any one who criticizes Hamas are punished severely, often through torture and death. Hamas is made up of animals - not ones who want to fight for the freedom of the Palestinian people (they could have but didn't). They want to fight for the destruction of Jews. Hamas is no different and no better than any other group that espouses radical Islamic views. So what of a cease-fire? Oh my heart says yes. We have to protect those children. But I also know that Israel cannot live side by side with Hamas. Israel ignored the rockets poring into Israel from hamas for years. Israel ignored the kidnappings of soldiers. But Israel cannot ignore what happened on October 7. If there is a cease fire, Hamas wins. Full-stop. Hamas has dug these tunnels and is fighting in buildings housing civilians, who are being harmed. If any other country in the world was in Israel's situation, no one would bat an eye at it defending itself. How do I know that? We have real, true, genocides occuring all over the world at this very moment: China is ethnically cleansing the Uyghurs; there is a genocide occurring in the DRC and in Sudan; Rohingya and others are being bombed to oblivion by the Burmese government. Where is the BDS movement against those countries? Why aren't thousands of people fighting for the freedom of Uyghurs in East Turkestan? Because these kinds of protests only occur against Israel. If Mexican terrorists came into the US and did what Hamas did to Israel, no one would say a word about the retribution we would enact. But we speak out against Israel. If the world truly cared about Palestinians (which I don't think it does), then they would be protesting Egypt for not opening its border to refugees, as Jordan and Turkey did for Syrians. Hamas has to go. There is no other solution: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/06/hamas-genocide-against-israel/ (Now, even as Israel seeks to find and destroy Hamas terrorists, much of the discussion has moved on to considering how to achieve peace between Israel and Palestinians. But what happened on Oct. 7 cannot be consigned to the violent past; it cannot be lumped in with all the other terrorist attacks and massacres that have marked the sorry history of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.)
There's so much to unpack here, and I'm not able to address every point, but I will say that I firmly believe that there are always people, the world over, who even in the face of atrocious violence, like that visited upon Israelis on October 7, will seek out and champion alternatives to perpetrating more violence, vengeance, and bloodshed. There will always be peacemakers; people who realize that the worst crimes against humanity cannot be met with still more crimes. In my own efforts to understand how a different future is possible—one that does not allow for further targeting of Jews or Palestinians, but that does try to redress the harms of the past and present—I'm following closely the advocacy and efforts of groups like Standing Together for Peace. Sending you any bit of comfort I can, in a truly heartbreaking moment.
I don't know where you find the space in your mind & heart to read detailed accounts and watch this terror. I cannot do it or I too would be up in the middle of the night-- over and over again. I try and stay as up-to-date as possible but it just kills my soul to read the details and see the pictures. Perhaps it is an ostrich like tendency but it's what I have to do to stay present and halfway sane especially at this time of the year.
I I often go back to what Anne Morrow Lindberg wrote in Gifts from the Sea, when she wrote that modern communication loads the human frame with more than it can carry- "we are asked to feel compassionately for everyone in the world - to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print and to implement in action, every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts & minds." That this awareness is an intolerable burden.
She goes on to further say that she thinks part of the answer is to begin at home - in your own home- with your own life - with your own family, and let that caring/love/compassion reverberate out into the world.
I have no idea -- these are just some thoughts and yes, I have contacted my representatives because I have to do something!
Spent the weekend going down waterslides and eating ice cream with my warm and safe children and I also can't stop thinking about the dusty, injured, orphaned, hungry, terrified children in Gaza.
I was going to comment yesterday, but I decided to give it a day. I think you are very brave for posting on the politics of something that I think has affected us all, including me as a Jewish mother and mother of Jewish children. I work with victims of genocide and on issues of human rights, and I have so many feelings all over the place on this one. My strongest feeling is that no child should ever be buried; no parent should ever have to bury her child. Never. Under any conditions. I feel that way for Gazans, for Israelis, for Sudanese, for Saudi Arabian, for Chinese -- I don't care whom. The universality we all share is a love for our children. I also know that the issue of Israel and Palestine is long and complicated, and support for Israel does not mean that we cannot also fight for two states and let Palestinians live in their own state in peace. That is what I want. However, even if Israel leaves Gaza, that will not happen. Hamas is a terrorist organization, not a government, not freedom fighters. Palestinians have been offered their own country multiple times over the past 70+ years, including as recently as 20 years ago, and they walked away. Instead, they elected a terrorist organization to govern them, and that organization has funneled money that could be use to lift up the people of Palestine into weapons, tunnels, and the support of their leaders who live the good life in Qatar. They have torn down the infrastructure Israel had built there for the betterment of the Palestinian people when Israel left in 2005. And they have despotically harmed the very Palestinian people the group purports to support. Women, LGBTQ+, and any one who criticizes Hamas are punished severely, often through torture and death. Hamas is made up of animals - not ones who want to fight for the freedom of the Palestinian people (they could have but didn't). They want to fight for the destruction of Jews. Hamas is no different and no better than any other group that espouses radical Islamic views. So what of a cease-fire? Oh my heart says yes. We have to protect those children. But I also know that Israel cannot live side by side with Hamas. Israel ignored the rockets poring into Israel from hamas for years. Israel ignored the kidnappings of soldiers. But Israel cannot ignore what happened on October 7. If there is a cease fire, Hamas wins. Full-stop. Hamas has dug these tunnels and is fighting in buildings housing civilians, who are being harmed. If any other country in the world was in Israel's situation, no one would bat an eye at it defending itself. How do I know that? We have real, true, genocides occuring all over the world at this very moment: China is ethnically cleansing the Uyghurs; there is a genocide occurring in the DRC and in Sudan; Rohingya and others are being bombed to oblivion by the Burmese government. Where is the BDS movement against those countries? Why aren't thousands of people fighting for the freedom of Uyghurs in East Turkestan? Because these kinds of protests only occur against Israel. If Mexican terrorists came into the US and did what Hamas did to Israel, no one would say a word about the retribution we would enact. But we speak out against Israel. If the world truly cared about Palestinians (which I don't think it does), then they would be protesting Egypt for not opening its border to refugees, as Jordan and Turkey did for Syrians. Hamas has to go. There is no other solution: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/06/hamas-genocide-against-israel/ (Now, even as Israel seeks to find and destroy Hamas terrorists, much of the discussion has moved on to considering how to achieve peace between Israel and Palestinians. But what happened on Oct. 7 cannot be consigned to the violent past; it cannot be lumped in with all the other terrorist attacks and massacres that have marked the sorry history of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.)
There's so much to unpack here, and I'm not able to address every point, but I will say that I firmly believe that there are always people, the world over, who even in the face of atrocious violence, like that visited upon Israelis on October 7, will seek out and champion alternatives to perpetrating more violence, vengeance, and bloodshed. There will always be peacemakers; people who realize that the worst crimes against humanity cannot be met with still more crimes. In my own efforts to understand how a different future is possible—one that does not allow for further targeting of Jews or Palestinians, but that does try to redress the harms of the past and present—I'm following closely the advocacy and efforts of groups like Standing Together for Peace. Sending you any bit of comfort I can, in a truly heartbreaking moment.
Likewise... the civil conversation is what is important, not absolute agreement.
Love you.
Thank you, Erin.
Erin,
I don't know where you find the space in your mind & heart to read detailed accounts and watch this terror. I cannot do it or I too would be up in the middle of the night-- over and over again. I try and stay as up-to-date as possible but it just kills my soul to read the details and see the pictures. Perhaps it is an ostrich like tendency but it's what I have to do to stay present and halfway sane especially at this time of the year.
I I often go back to what Anne Morrow Lindberg wrote in Gifts from the Sea, when she wrote that modern communication loads the human frame with more than it can carry- "we are asked to feel compassionately for everyone in the world - to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print and to implement in action, every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts & minds." That this awareness is an intolerable burden.
She goes on to further say that she thinks part of the answer is to begin at home - in your own home- with your own life - with your own family, and let that caring/love/compassion reverberate out into the world.
I have no idea -- these are just some thoughts and yes, I have contacted my representatives because I have to do something!
Peace☮️
Spent the weekend going down waterslides and eating ice cream with my warm and safe children and I also can't stop thinking about the dusty, injured, orphaned, hungry, terrified children in Gaza.
Crying and praying
Shimmering prose...
Shattering sorrows.
Oh, Erin. Oh, those new, fragile lives.
Thank you Erin for putting this unspeakable heartache into words.
Beautiful....terribly sad....
With you on this, too. It's always on my mind; the constant, horrible juxtaposition. Feeling warmth at home, and then deep ache.
I am so with you on this.
I think about this all the time.