I was one of, I think, no more than a few hundred people in Israel who throughout the day of the invasion on Shemini Atzeret did not know was happening. I do not mean that I was unaware of the full extent of the disaster or the severity of the atrocities committed. That was not so uncommon. I mean I didn’t know anything had happened at all until I looked at my phone after havdalah.
Obviously, anyone secular enough to look at a screen on Shabbos knew what was going on from early in the morning. In addition, most of Israel’s population live in areas that had rocket sirens. Even up here in the Golan, there are many thousands of religious people in the medical or security services who have beepers or phones and received a notice to rush into action. Two young religious men from my town, both of them fine people by all accounts, drove south and were killed in action after having not received adequate body armour. Anyone still left in schul tried to varying extents to proceed with the service as news of the horror and humiliation dripped in.
Or at least so I understand because I was having lunch. In Israel, because there is no second day of Yom Tov, Shemini Atzeret has been cannibalised by Simhat Torah and is universally observed as a day of dancing. Dancing is forbidden on Yom Tov and a fortiori on Shabbos, which it also was that year. I don’t want to get into that now, but it’s an objective fact and there are no counterarguments. This year I was poked into overcoming my usual lethargy and organised a house minyan and it was lovely, but usually what I do is go to schul and then leave after hallel before the dancing starts and spend the rest of the day at home. Some years I go back for Mincha, but my guest wasn’t in the mood and it being Shabbos adds an extra layer of distaste for the whole affair, so I davened at home and remained blissfully unaware. If I knew my neighbours better, they might have told me, but I live on the edge of town and next door live Russians who have trance raves so they didn’t.
Maybe that’s an interesting anecdote or maybe it’s not. You’re the one who reads this; I’m just writing it. What I’ve wondered on and off since then, though, is whether this is the reason that my response to the whole thing was the opposite of everyone around me. Almost the entire Israeli and Jewish world moved rightwards, and increased its cruelty threshold and I went left, after a fashion. If I had experienced that day like everyone else instead of singing zemiros and chilling out with a book then would I have come out of it the same way as everyone else?
There are other explanations. I’m a contrarian, plus I was already on the same kind of general trajectory as the Left Moldbuggists but, in the absence of an audience, without any incentive to overshoot for provocation points. For a while - it’s hard to remember how long without documentation - I’d been saying ‘at least the smolanim are white’ to be edgy, and if the history of the dissident Right shows anything it’s that anything you say to be edgy will end up one day being your sincere belief. So maybe that’s it. If you were on a slow cruise to the Right, as most Israelis were, then October 7th kicked it into overdrive. If you were on a slow cruise to the Left, then maybe it did the same.
The story I tell myself is this. For many years, I had heard people, some of them friends, some of them acquaintances, some of them social media personalities whose videos were passed around on Telegram, some of them Rabbis, say various things about what has to be done with the Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, the region, the world. They are all Amalek; there is no degree of collateral damage that is too high; their children will grow up to be terrorists; to kill them is a mitzvah; cruelty to them is mercy to ourselves. I thought that they were directionally correct - and perhaps at a certain time they were - and that when push comes to shove they wouldn’t actually do that. They didn’t mean it, at least they didn’t mean it, mean it. There’s even a term, ‘Shabbos table guy’ for the type of character who sounds off on how all you need to do is nuke Jordan and it will be fine. But Shlomo’s a sweety-pie; if that Arab child was staring him in the face, he wouldn’t really pull the trigger. Obviously.
I thought to myself a few things. First of all, this must have been the experience of many Gazans over the past few decades as their society turned insane, contorting itself into something foul, rancid. ‘Sure, Sheik Abu Bamba is very free with his words. But the Jews, it is true, have been so cruel to us and a reckoning is due. No, we will not hunt them to the last man and drink their blood like he says; but they will have to pay, somehow. How? We’ll see when the time comes.’ Something like that. How do you ever know whether the people around you really mean it? You find out when they have the chance. In the meantime, though, you should probably err on the side of caution. You don’t have to gaze at the hummus and wonder whether there’s anyone else at the table you can raise your eyebrow to. You can say, ‘no, shut up, that’s deranged’.
The second thing I thought is this. I know a lot of people with genocidal views about Arabs. Some of them I like more, some of them I like less, but in almost no cases do I think they deserve to be killed. Most people in Gaza have very deplorable opinions about the conflict. The extent of this is somewhat exaggerated in Israeli discourse, though to a lesser extent than it is underplayed in western discourse. Lior Schlein had a clip that went around a lot recently on the ethics of killing Gazan babies.
But I realised that this misses the point. There are indeed people in Gaza who areחף מפשע, but even the ones who aren’t don’t actually deserve to die, not in that sense. Some Christians say that not only does humanity all deserve to die, we deserve to be tortured for all eternity, but even they don’t say that you get to go and lock random unredeemed sinners in a room and torture them, not even a little bit. My Kahanist friends, even the ones who spam me with Hilltop slop in the middle of the night (hi Meir), shouldn’t be killed for their crummy views, and nor should their Gazan equivalents. Some people there really do deserve to die; some need to be killed for tactical reasons, and, to some extent, some others will have to get wasted on the way there. Assuming there’s some kind of point to it. I’m a very moderate person. But the median Gazan doesn’t deserve to get killed because of his crummy beliefs. I know perfectly well that these are not deep or profound thoughts. There’s no excuse for not grasping them right away. But there’s no excuse for most of the dumb crap that people believe either. We should all be patient.
The third thing I thought wasn’t really a thought, it was just revulsion. I still haven’t watched most of the footage that’s publicly available, but that night I binged on various videos that were going around, mainly on non-Israeli sites. Many years, I stay up after Shemini Atzeret and catch up on work I didn’t do over Hol haMoed, taking advantage of not having two-day Yom Tov to meet sundry deadlines. It’s doubtful whether this is ever a good idea, but it was definitely a bad idea that time, because I got hardly anything done. I just kind of sat there stunned.
The day after I looked for some volunteering to do. Like a lot of Olim, I felt guilty about not having driven off to an army base as Israelis my age were doing. The volunteering I did wasn’t very useful; I should probably have searched around rather than just doing the first thing that came up. For the first two days, I did some stuff that at least felt good, carrying around chest freezers, and bagging up rubbish. But after that I was just wasting time, or doing jobs that teenage girls would do better. And then eventually school started again, with a completely unworkable and chaotic system in light of potential threats from the north, so I went back to work. I remember two things most clearly from that fortnight. The first was sitting in the Netzah Yehuda base eating a burger, while a sweet, if somewhat awkward, young soldier was flicking through his smartphone. He gave me a nudge and showed me the phone. It was a picture of a kid mangled up in rubble. I thought I should probably put down the burger as some kind of token sign of allegiance to civilized humanity, but I was very hungry. The second was in a certain fellow volunteer’s home while we took a break. The TV was on the entire time, though no-one was watching it. Secular people of a certain age live like this I am given to believe. The intent of the producers presumably was not to traumatise the viewer by subjecting him or her to an endless stream of atrocity accounts, but I can’t see what other effect it could have.
One thing I did do was write an article. I didn’t have a blog back then, so no-one read it. It’s not a good article at all. Two particular lines make me wince. But it’s good to have a record of what you wrote, so here it is.
