United in Grief
As the violent escalation in Israel/Palestine breaks our hearts, mourning together across differences can heal us and maybe even make us stronger
“I asked him: ‘Did you grieve?’ / Interrupting, he answered: ‘Mahmoud, my friend, / Grief is a white bird / That does not come near the battlefields”
– from “A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies” by Mahmoud Darwish
The sun rises on a new day outside the window of my apartment here in Brooklyn. I am far away from the battlefields in Israel/Palestine—far away, but brought closer by my phone, my fucking phone. I have been reading the updates from the Guardian, Haaretz, and the New York Times, tracking the death toll as it rises by the hour, Israelis and Palestinians killed by combatants from “the other side.” I have spoken to Israeli colleagues of mine and heard the tremor of fear rattling in their voices. Friends and family members in the army reserves being called up to fight, to defend, to kill. I check the Instagram stories of my Palestinian friends in Masafer Yatta, who, in a short while, if not already, will be encountering some of these reservists banging on the doors of their homes and setting up checkpoints on their roads. I have seen images of burnt out buildings across the south of the Land, torched by Hamas militants, and I have seen apartment towers felled in seconds by bombs from Israeli warplanes. How many more mothers in Gaza wailing over the bodies of their murdered children do we have to watch? It’s all too much.
And I have listened as Jewish and Palestinian observers have issued statements from afar, like me–from New York to California. There are some jubilant celebrations, elation at Palestinians breaking out of the cage, retaking territory after so many decades of seemingly endless losses. There are hardened proclamations that we must kill all the terrorists, no mercy for the sick bastards that took civilians hostage. And much more.
Palestinian organizers in Chicago are leading marches in Chicago, bedecked in red, black, white, and green. Hura, hura Falastine! Free, free Palestine! Resist, by any means necessary! Some say.
And institutional Jewish organizers in New York plan vigils calling on the world to “stand with Israel” amidst the onslaught. Israel must have a right to defend itself. By any means necessary. With the full backing of my country, the United States.
I find it all rather alienating–and alienated–these nationalist postures. It’s abundantly clear that the flag waving and tribalism is what has maintained this state of war for so many decades. Though these gatherings are presented to us as places to feel connected with community that shares your values and interests, they seem to me empty, rather like they are dead already—echoes of a 20th century politics that long ago gave its last gasp. We need something new, something fresh, something that breaks the old molds to forge a shared, non-nationalist politics which radiates radical empathy and projects a life-affirming vision of the future for all people who call the Land home.
I was inspired to read the words of Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and national leader at Standing Together, a joint Palestinian-Israeli movement for social justice. Sally wrote in a thread on X (formerly known as Twitter):
“We're aching. All of us. Some of my very close friends, partners, activists. anti-occupation and social justice activists who I see as real allies to our Palestinian cause are kidnapped, killed, or have lost someone.
“I am hurting and my heart is bleeding for the society I am also part of, and for my friends. I am also hurting because my people are under attack in Gaza, and still dying and killed in the West Bank, and [tortured] in prisons. Our kids in Yafa being [arrested] "preventively"
“It seems like we are not allowed to hurt for both. You hurt as a Palestinian? No place for you here. Let's remember that it's the most important thing we can do at this moment. To allow ourselves to hurt for both, to [grieve] for all. Towards a place where we can also build for all.”
I read this, and although she is talking about impossible pain—kidnappings, a heart bleeding, tortured in prison—I want to shout with—I am a little embarrassed to say—joy at what she is putting out there. Can I tell it like it is? There is a tendency among some Palestinians to act as if their suffering is the only one that matters, that their pain is the only real pain. This same tendency—more than a tendency, almost a mantra—exists on my “side”, the Jewish side. Sally’s words, which are more than words, a cry from the soul for liberation from petty tribalism and the death it has wrought, have the potential to break the spell that has bound her people and my people in this war for the other’s destruction.
The incantation gains power as it is repeated, especially from the other nation who calls the Land home. I was moved to tears when, last night, I watched a video of an Israeli father, whose daughter Noa had been taken captive by Hamas, expressing care and understanding for what Palestinian families are going through right now.
“I want there to be peace, but I also want my daughter to return just as much,” Yaakov Argamani spoke into the Israeli journalist’s microphone.
“I want all of the captives to return and for there to be peace at last. Enough of the wars. Enough with everything we are seeing. Enough, enough, enough. They [Palestinians] have also lost loved ones in war. They have captives, they also have mourning mothers. Let’s engage our emotions. Let’s really feel this. We are two nations from the same father. In the light of all of this, in the light of the Tenakh, let’s please make peace, but real peace! Real peace! I wish it would happen.”
A call and a response. A glimpse of a glimmer of ha’olam ha’ba, the world to come.
I am reminded of what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said expressed several decades ago in his, “Afterward: the Consequences of 1948.” I first read these words in undergrad when I took a course on the “Arab-Israeli Conflict” at the University of Michigan. Said had already been dead for several years by then. He had not lived to see the movement that he dreamed of realized in any kind of scale. But, from the grave, his expression felt like prophecy to me then much as it does today. Said wrote:
“Perhaps it is now possible to speak of a new cycle opening in which the dialectic of separation and separatism has reached a sort of point of exhaustion, a new process might be beginning, glimpsed here and there within the anguished repertoire of communitarianism which by now every reflecting Arab and every Jew somehow feels as the home of last resort.” He continued: “What I want to propose is an attempt to flesh out the emergence of a political and intellectual strategy based on just peace and just coexistence based on equality. This strategy is based on a full consciousness of what 1948 was for Palestinians and for Israelis, the point being that no bowdlerization of the past, no diminishment of its effects can possibly serve any sort of decent future. I want to suggest here the need for a new kind of grouping, one that provides a critique of ideological narratives as well as a form that is compatible with real citizenship and a real democratic politics.”
Said goes on to sketch out in four points the basic elements of this program, including: (1) conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli history not as separate things but one whole (“Neither Palestinian nor Israeli history at this point is a thing in itself, without the other”), (2) constructing a composite identity based on “that shared or common history, irreconcilabilities, antinomies and all”, (3) demanding common citizenship without ethnic or religious exclusivity, and (4) educating with a special emphasis on the Other, “in which the diasporic/exilic and research communities must play a central role.”
It is true what Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote when he gave his Israeli interlocutor in the epigraphical quote, that grief is a white bird that does not come near the battlefields. But what happens to the body of a people when it cannot process its loss, its heartbreaking, ineffable loss, in the form of grieving, of uncontrollable shaking, of screaming out, of damning God, of sobbing into your loved ones arms? What happens when instead of being deeply sad you don your green uniform or your black-and-white keffiyeh and pick up your gun to go to war? Or take to social media to denounce “them,” to hurl epithets like stones (“Terrorist!”), to practice that dark alchemy of turning pain to poison because you feel (you know) that you need to fight in order to defend yourself, to defend your people.
We in the diaspora and we in exile have a special privilege in these moments of the whirlwind. We are not there. We are not, broadly speaking, under immediate danger ourselves, even as our friends and our loved ones are. God willing, we have some distance to pause, to meditate. We can let ourselves ache both when we read Facebook posts from the children of an Israeli mother taken hostage by Hamas and when we watch the video of a funeral procession for a Palestinian child cut down by Israeli bullets. We can, if we let ourselves, feel it all and know in bodies that all the pain is real pain. We can be united in grief.
As a first step, here in New York, which is home to so many Jews and to so many Palestinians, we could choose to organize a joint vigil which honors everyone’s pain. We don’t need to equate it or compare or contrast or pay much attention to the intellectual movements of the mind, so trained by nationalist fervor. We can simply bear witness together, grieve together, and honor one another’s shared humanity. Maybe this opportunity at connection across perceived difference would serve as a means of healing for all of us, a gentle moment amidst the horror. Who knows? Maybe in this seemingly soft, quiet action there lies the seed of something revolutionary, the nucleus for a future in which every Palestinian and Israeli who calls the Land home can live there in peace and equality.