I am so saddened to see the calamity that many pro-Palestinian progressives have created for themselves.
In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ slaughter of Jewish children, mothers and fathers, a significant number of progressive organizations offered no support for Jews and instead blamed the attack on Israel’s brutal efforts to annihilate Palestine.
This response is being roundly condemned across the political spectrum as unbelievably inhumane, and indeed as smacking of antisemitism.
I agree with the criticism. But we cannot just critique Hamas.
In the days and weeks since the October 7 Hamas attack, my heart breaks for the Palestinian people who are being terrorized and killed by Israeli bombs (and soon by Israeli ground troops).
At a time of war, a moment of intense emotions, we can ill afford the now all-too common practice of cancelling people because of our solidarity with one side in a conflict. Once again, we have the opportunity to consider how building the beloved community instructs us to view this moment. And we must take this opportunity seriously, because a split among pro-democracy activists will open the door to fascists always looking for an opportunity such as this.
Let’s start with this: Hamas’ decision to murder over a thousand Jews has evoked in virtually every Jew in the world memories of the Holocaust and the pogroms. That includes myself, someone who has spent his entire life rejecting the Hebrew religion and despising Zionism. It’s simple, really: Hamas calculated that a terrorist attack would traumatize Jews. It sought to provoke the reaction one expects from a traumatized people, especially a nation led by right-wing fanatic Zionists: a deeply felt need for revenge. This emotion is too easily aroused in traumatized people because resorting to violence gives them the illusion that they have agency again.
Hamas’s cold-blooded calculation underscores their deep hatred of Jewish people but it also reveals their complete lack of concern for the safety of Palestinian children, women and men who are already suffering the full fury of a traumatized Jewish state, a state whose leaders specialize in using trauma to keep themselves in power. Netanyahu’s “collective punishment” of Palestinians in Gaza is more than a naked violation of human rights: it is reactivating Palestinians’ collective trauma, the Naqba of 1948, when Zionists murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians and expelled over half a million people from the West Bank, forcing them to seek refuge in Gaza.
Netanyahu is happily giving Hamas what I suspect they wanted all along: to draw Israel into an occupation of Gaza, which will lead to a full-on Palestinian mobilization (and likely also draw in Hezbollah and other nations) , a rage over which Hamas believes Israel cannot prevail.
Hamas is perfectly willing to heap more trauma on the Palestinian people if it furthers their extremist goals. And Netanyahu is whipping up and exploiting Jewish trauma to justify Israel’s upcoming occupation of Gaza. Palestinians and Jews are trapped in a downward cycle of trauma leading to violence leading to more trauma. Hamas, just like Netanyahu’s party, is the product of–and merchants of–the politics of trauma.
What we need now is a language that recognizes trauma felt by all parties in this conflict. The problem with blaming only Israel for the attacks is that it does not offer support to traumatized Jews. The problem with not denouncing Israel’s role in creating the conditions for Hamas to rule Gaza is that it does not offer support for traumatized Palestinians.
What traumatized people on both sides of this conflict need right now is safety. And the starting point for that safety is for them to feel that people who did NOT experience that trauma acknowledge their experience, and are at a minimum able to offer their sympathies.
Without this assurance, nothing else matters. Even much-needed Jewish-led demonstrations calling for a cease-fire in the Middle East seem oddly out of touch with the fear and grieving that now grips both Jews and Palestinians. The political demand for a cease-fire is absolutely correct. But at a moment of heightened trauma, that demand must be linked to that experience. This can easily be done, by simply stating that violence only creates trauma, and never can heal it. But without that acknowledgement, the demand for a ceasefire can be (and was) too often construed as another example of people ignoring the plight of Jews.
Similarly, the framework of the two-state solution needs to be linked to healing trauma. The two-state solution is still alive, at least in U.S. foreign policy (Biden reaffirmed it on October 19). The right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination and statehood needs to be understood as the only possible context in which the long trauma of Palestine can be healed.
Unfortunately, both Hamas and Netanyahu’s thugs are hellbent on creating the maximum conditions to make both Palestinians and Jews feel unsafe, and so the cycle of trauma and violence continues to wreak havoc.
Back to my sadness about the progressives who cannot bring themselves to offer sympathy to the Jewish people: their failure is a measure of their own trauma. When students at Harvard, Stanford and my own institution, Berkeley, only think about the suffering of Palestinians at the moment of the mass killing of Jews, they have de-humanized themselves. Of course they are right to care, and care deeply, about the suffering that Palestinians experience daily at hands of Jews. But I suspect the reason that these students have not acknowledged the suffering of Jews is that they see Israel (and perhaps all Jews?) as the epitome of privileged people who are responsible for Palestinians’s suffering. And since at this moment progressives are exploring how to dismantle all forms of privilege, support for privileged people is unthinkable. Indeed, the campuses with the greatest outpouring of support for Palestine and silence on the murder of Jews are those with the most privileged students, who themselves must show their commitment to dismantling privileges, however performative that stance might be.
But, to be real, those progressives who did not acknowledge the suffering of Jews (or of Palestinians) have a deeper problem: they have lost touch with their own humanity. In an era marked by Trumpist fascism, wildfires and heat domes, hyper-inequality and pandemics, everyone has been traumatized, everyone is struggling with their own humanity.
We can ill-afford to condemn anyone for lapses in their humanity at this time. That includes progressive organizations and individuals who have forgotten the plight of Jews at this moment. While we must call them out for their mistake because of the harm they have caused, we need to also acknowledge their humanity, and ask what we can do to make them safe in the face of the traumatic realities they face. To my progressive brothers and sisters reading this: if any of this makes sense to you, please include a plan for self-care and for building loving and trusting relations as you do your social justice work. We cannot afford to turn against one another , especially at a moment when we need the greatest possible unity against the danger of fascism. As this moment has revealed all too tragically, if we do not ground ourselves in love, our social justice work will surely suffer.
This is how we build the beloved community. The process is unbelievably complex and involves many wrong turns along the way. At this moment, in relation to Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, we must start by acknowledging the trauma on both sides. Before we can get to the politics of the moment, we must center ourselves on the human emotions unleashed by Hamas’ attack. Rather than entering a competition over whose humanity matters more, let us insist that everyone counts–including Jews. Let us turn this dreadful moment into a stepping stone in the long, hard work of building the beloved community.
The long view 