Somewhere beneath all the other, rawer heartbreaks of Gaza, or coiled around them, is the specific grief I feel as a Jew that all of this is being inflicted under a flag bearing the star of my people — that wherever it appears, this symbol will only ever again remind people of this theft, anguish and suffering. It will be cursed by history, and it's hard to argue anything but that this is rightly so.
I have never felt interpellated by that star: I've just never felt it named me. It's clear that now I never will. I don't think I will ever understand how a people who know what disinheritance, displacement and being targeted for extinction feel like can turn around and do that to another people. I have to consider it the greatest moral failure of our time.
And I'm trying, fairly desperately at this hour, to avoid drawing what feel like the obvious conclusions about human capacity more broadly, or about the unwisdom of conflating victimhood with heroism. If the victims of collective oppression can so swiftly become its architects and authors, it seems pretty clear to me that horror alone does not and cannot sanctify.
we all know the majority of Jewish and even Israeli people don't support what's happening. It's sad that authoritarian governments everywhere just make everything worse. The answer is to stop electing authoritarians. They don't have any answers, they're not providing solutions, they just make everything worse. Enough. Stop giving them power.
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