I’m about to address something difficult, so please bear with me.
The Guardian posted an article today - now removed - regarding a documentary of the events of the massacre on October 7th. The review spent time wringing its hands over the portrayal of the terrorists as…terrorists.
This is something we’ve been dealing with for a year and I feel like everyone has been reticent to discuss it, but here goes: most Palestinians are not terrorists. Gazans are not synonymous with Hamas. That should be clear - and the people praising Hamas and equating all of the people with Hamas are actually the ones being damaging and racist.
With this in mind, there are two massive aspects of this that we need to be able to discuss if ANY progress is to be made or any understanding is to be had. The first is the violent Jew hatred that is used to indoctrinate and incite children, in what should unequivocally, by every humanitarian group in the world, be deemed child abuse. for instance, UNRWA textbooks using examples of killing Jews as math problems is well documented and extremely disturbing. if we are never allowed to talk about the fact that this happens and how utterly destructive it is, then the problem is perpetrated indefinitely.
children should not be taught this, exposed to this. but there is way too much within this to unpack here.
the second point is in regards to the massacre itself. thousands of Hamas members (and other terrorist groups) broke into Israel that day to commit atrocities, but there were civilians who followed them - including people who brought children along (again, horrific child abuse). this is all on the CCTV footage, and captured in emergency calls from that day. just as the streets were flooded with people in Gaza when the hostages and bodies were brought in, who were celebrating and beating them and spitting on them. This DOES NOT MEAN we’re talking about everyone in Gaza, of course we’re not. those thousands of people remain a small portion of the population. yet to deny this happened - and to deny that some hostages were held in homes and civilian areas intentionally - is part of the inability to grant agency to the people who did participate in this. it is, in fact, another form of racism, of the idea of low expectations or noble savagery, that they either have no choice or can’t do better than extremist violence, or that they wouldn’t do that and the victims who witnessed it and suffered firsthand are somehow liars.
it is not “demonizing” the perpetrators to call them perpetrators, it would only be so if it was directing that at the entire people, which it is not. the terrorists and those who followed them made an active choice that day: to brutalize, rape, murder, and pillage across the kibbutzim and a music festival. saying this plainly is not a way to justify war or dehumanize or whatever else, it’s simply the truth of what happened. I don’t believe there is anywhere else on earth where a massacre of this magnitude, with these types of atrocities, would be discussed like this. if one commits acts of terrible violence, if one loots and kills innocent people in their homes, typically there is no ambiguity in speaking about that.
this post has footage from the pogrom, so approach it with caution:
this is from a different forthcoming documentary, but we’ve heard these stories, particularly from the children, since last year. denying them is a secondary trauma. again, because apparently this needs to be made clear, IT IS NOT ALL THE PEOPLE, but there is inherent antisemitism and radicalization that has been perpetuated for generations, even by official governing bodies, that must be confronted or there will never be progress.
everyone who is screencapped or linked here wants peace, none of them want civilians to die, none of them want constant warfare and conflict, none of them wants to see suffering. they all pray for coexistence and a better future for all. this is true for every Jew and/or Israeli I follow. most of them wholly disagree with the actions of the right wing government. yet they’re vilified as monstrous when they speak about the atrocities and grief of a pogrom.
the inability to have a dialogue is making this worse. the media pulling stuff like what The Guardian has done this week (and countless other complicit Western outlets) is making this worse. the fact that only Jews tend to be willing to mourn the victims, listen to the hostage testimony, and hear and hold space for one another is making this worse, continually isolating and traumatizing us, and heightening the intractability of these issues. it is gaslighting, it is structural, and it is also predicated on the ancient foundation of Jew hatred - that violence against us can be upheld or reframed as necessary. that our grief should be contextualized, because it’s not universally human, it’s Jewish, and therefore other.
Adam Kirsch wrote: “Young people today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their peers on college campuses are not shamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews: because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.”
like I can’t…I don’t even know how to express how exhausting and frustrating and heartbreaking this is. we’re still having to fight to even say that the massacre was wrong and extraordinarily brutal and that it caused us collective pain. we’re still not allowed to grieve. and it seems like the world is content with that being our fate forever, condemned to separateness and “context” and regarding us with suspicion (at best). this has to change, but I don’t know how it will.