It is now 1 p.m., Wednesday, October 18, and I am at home, in Tel Aviv. Eleven days have passed since the October 7 attack on Israel. At least 1,400 people were killed in one day, mostly civilians, and there are around 200 Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Israel has since launched its deadliest attack on Gaza so far: around 3,500 Gazans have been killed, about 1,000 of them children. Hamas still manages to fire rockets at Israel, mostly toward towns closer to Gaza, but some toward Tel Aviv. Every evening, between 7 and 9 p.m., sirens go off and we run to find shelter. During the day we can sometimes hear unidentified explosions in the distance. There are many ambulances and police sirens; helicopters and fighter jets pass overhead, and there’s a constant sound of drones hovering over the city, to what purpose we do not know. Most stores are closed shut. Many restaurants and cafés have been transformed into supply centers from which food and equipment are delivered by volunteers across the country to soldiers, to survivors of the attack, and to residents from towns that have been evacuated. At night, a few bars open. They are half empty, the patrons drink and speak softly. In normal days, the city is packed and vibrant till late into the night. Around midnight, I go out to the balcony or take a stroll in the vacant streets. Everywhere the quiet is breathless.
In this land, nothing is very far. A leisurely drive from Tel Aviv to Gaza City, if it were possible, would take about one hour. By the end of this week, in the span of fourteen days, a total of 5,000 people—Israeli and Palestinian—will have died, many more lives will have been ruined beyond repair, horror, panic and hatred will have been instilled in masses of people, not only here, in this small land, but across the globe. Darkness behind us, darkness ahead.
I write down the date and time because every thought and observation is quickly rendered obsolete. Anything I write can only be a journal entry, a document addressed to the future from a past that cannot know itself. Every day we learn more about what happened but are late to realize what is going on. By the time we understand something, something else has happened that we can’t even begin to imagine. Every day we learn of more horrific stories, each one incomprehensible: last messages from loved ones as the gunmen approached, people burned alive inside their homes, children seeing their parents being killed in front of their eyes, whole families executed. Every day the story of how we got to the present moment is retold or replaced, but no story can be sustained, no story is convincing. Each day I wake up and look at my phone to figure out which of my nightmares is real and which is not yet. Last night, hundreds of people were killed in a bombing of al-Ahli Arab hospital. Who is to blame? Fingers are being pointed in different directions, various pieces of evidence are being proffered, but the dead can neither raise their fingers nor study the evidence. Every day, Israeli families are begging politicians to free their children, cousins, siblings, parents, and grandparents, who are being held hostage. The politicians respond that victory is more important than freeing the hostages. That this is being said and that it is being accepted is yet another horror all unto itself. To even begin to fathom the suffering and loss of the last eleven days is to come undone; we hang on to denial as if to our dear lives. But we are failing: we are coming undone. And none of it is over, more is coming. The future is approaching us like a black hole. Those who will die tomorrow are walking among us today. Are we them?
I heard somewhere that the ritual of the handshake originated from a procedure for the establishment of trust. The hand is shown to be empty of weapon, and thus physical proximity can be tolerated, trust is expressed by the touching of hands: hands holding each other instead of weapons. But some prior sense of safety is a condition for this procedure. The other person might be too dangerous even to get near let alone to touch, or the person might hold a weapon in the other hand—the one that has not been revealed. The establishment of trust cannot take place under the reign of fear. I feel that we have entered, now more totally than ever, into a time when handshakes are impossible.
Since October 7 there have been fierce debates around the world about condemnation and empathy. Some who sympathize with the Palestinian demand for freedom and the end of occupation and apartheid have refused to condemn or express grief over the mass killing of Israeli civilians and have perceived any show of empathy toward Israelis as a failure or even betrayal of the Palestinian cause. Others have called for a “humane left” committed to mourning the loss of all civilians, and they see this commitment as the basis of their resistance to Israeli occupation and apartheid. Meanwhile, in Israel, any show of empathy toward the suffering of Palestinians, or any rejection of calls to “flatten Gaza,” is seen as a failure of solidarity, bordering on treason, even while some of the survivors and family members of the victims of the attack declare that they themselves oppose the killing of civilians in Gaza.
At first, I couldn’t understand the various demands and refusals of empathy. Why resist showing empathy with civilian victims, no matter who they are? And why should the expression or denial of empathy be made into a condition for engaging in discussion? It seems to me now that these clashes have to do with the impossibility of handshakes. Genuine conversation depends on mutual recognition. To be recognized is, very roughly, to be publicly acknowledged as someone whose existence and dignity should be protected. When recognition is in doubt, expressions of empathy may be demanded in order to make recognition explicit. Expressions of empathy are like the baring of one’s hand. But if, as many feel at this moment, the recognition of one “side” comes at the expense of the other, the expression of empathy for one is the refusal of empathy for another. Many seem to feel that no hand is bare—that all hands are holding knives, pointing in opposite directions. This moment is characterized by a widespread conviction that recognition can only go in one direction: that any show of empathy toward Israelis is tantamount to supporting the oppression of Palestinians, and that any show of empathy toward Palestinians is tantamount to supporting the massacre on October 7.
Those who subscribe to this dichotomy see attempts to recognize all suffering as disingenuous and manipulative. They sometimes complain that symmetrical empathy entails symmetrical judgment, symmetrical condemnation, or attribution of symmetrical power. And since they reject these equivalences, they reject the equivalence of empathy. But empathy for all those who suffer doesn’t entail any of these equivalences. In principle, at least, people of opposite political views can consistently empathize with both Palestinian and Israeli suffering and yet vehemently disagree about who’s at fault, what should be done, and where justice lies.
I doubt the concern with false symmetries is the main driver behind the dichotomy of recognition. It is fueled in part by anti-Semitism and Islamophobia—a hatred of Jews, Arabs, or Muslims, found across the political spectrum, by which certain groups of people assert their identity and agency, revealing themselves as morally vile. But I believe the dichotomy is primarily fueled by panic and helplessness, by the deeply internalized, longstanding narratives that we resort to in order to make sense of the horror of the past eleven days. What happened is seen by many as proof that Israeli Jews and Palestinians cannot coexist, in the most literal sense of the term. It is important to understand why this is the conclusion so many reach. I can only try to speak to the Israeli reaction.
In the Israeli imagination, this land should have been empty when Jews immigrated here to settle it in the first half of the twentieth century: the vacant land of Israel, waiting for its children to return to it after two millennia in exile, to find refuge from their troubles. This land, we were raised to believe, is the one place Jews can claim as their own, the one place where we belong. But, as history would have it, the land was not empty and the people who lived here were reluctant to leave and hostile to the Zionist project. The existence of Palestinians in this land and their resistance to Israel was always seen as the main obstacle to realizing the Israeli dream, and Israel has responded to it by using force to push Palestinians away and to keep those who remain at bay. The full acknowledgment of Palestinians as equal citizens would have required a substantial change in the conception of Israel as a Jewish project, while the founding of an independent Palestinian state would have required Israel to give up parts of the land that are also widely seen as essential to the Israeli project. Furthermore, many Israelis see violent Palestinian resistance to the growing Jewish community in the first decades of the twentieth century and, later, to the founding of Israel in 1948 as proof that Palestinian political freedom poses an intolerable risk to Israel’s existence. What the majority of Israelis find impossible to accept is that many Palestinians see this land as their home—that those here are deeply committed to staying here and that those who are refugees aspire to return.
The conflict became even more acute when, in 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, thereby taking control of millions of Palestinians, many of whom had escaped as refugees to Jordan and Egypt in 1948. Israel wanted the land it conquered, not the Palestinians who lived on it. Again, force was used to control and expel Palestinian existence without recognizing the basic rights of Palestinians, who have since lived under military rule in these territories and the overwhelmingly majority of whom were not granted citizenship. In the 1990s, following the Oslo Accords, partial civil control over certain parts of the West Bank and Gaza was handed to the Palestinian Authority, a Fatah-controlled government body that, in many ways, serves as a contractor of the Israeli government. In 2005 Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza and withdrew its permanent ground forces, though it retained control of the borders, sea, air space, customs, currency, water and electricity supply, population registration, and much else. Two years later, after Hamas came to power in Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade, severely restricting movement of people and products into and out of the Strip. Periodically, Hamas has fired rockets into Israel, and Israel has conducted military campaigns in Gaza. Large-scale military campaigns occurred in 2008–9, 2012, 2014, and 2021.
Force has continued to be Israel’s primary mode of engagement with Palestinian existence in this land. But the force exercised against Palestinians, though often brutal, was restrained in various ways so as to accommodate—sometimes only in appearance—some of the demands of international law, Western politics, and Israelis’ own sense of justice. Most importantly, Israelis perceived Israel’s use of force as restrained. Sometimes Israel’s purported restraint was a source of pride, other times a source of frustration. For example, in 1994, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained the importance of the newly formed Palestinian Authority by noting that, unlike Israel, Yasser Arafat could fight Hamas “without Bagatz [Israel’s supreme court] and Betselem [a prominent Israeli human rights organization]”—that is, without being constrained by legal and moral considerations. In other words, somewhat-restrained force was Israel’s modus operandi. The “Palestinian problem” was contained or managed, not resolved, but this was a compromise most Israelis felt they could live with. It is not so anymore.
If the Israeli fantasy has always been a land empty of Palestinians, the Israeli nightmare has always been a Palestinian massacre of Jews. The reason for Israel’s existence is said to be the prevention of such attacks on defenseless Jews. The October 7 massacre was the greatest, most damning failure of the State of Israel in this regard: its force was not enough to defend Israelis against their own nightmares. Immediately following the massacre, comparisons to the pogroms and the Holocaust were made. The massacre is, for us, the end of history: an event that refuted the premise of our existence in this place.
The conclusion most Israelis draw from this situation is not that the use of force is limited in what it can achieve, but that we were mistaken to ever limit our use of force to begin with (another fantasy, another nightmare). Many find it difficult not to interpret the events of October 7 as a decisive confirmation of the longstanding Israeli suspicion that the Palestinians will slaughter us if they get the chance—in other words, as proof that the existence of one people can only come at the expense of the other. The fact that the Israeli nightmare became a reality leads many to conclude that the Israeli fantasy must also be achieved: we must use force to wipe “them” out, simply in order to survive.
But ethnic cleansing and genocide are not only morally reprehensible; they are impossible. Palestinians will continue to exist in this land, and there is nothing Israel can do about it. I think most Jewish Israelis know this, but given what happened, they find it impossible to accept. The compromise that allowed for some bare form of Palestinian existence under Israel’s rule of force can no longer be sustained, but the idea that force is our only savior is as entrenched as it ever was in the Israeli psyche.
I do not accept the dichotomy of recognition and the genocidal conclusion it leads to. I believe that force on its own is not power, and that power requires recognition of those who exist alongside us—recognition that their existence and dignity should be protected. To protect its own existence and dignity, Israel must fight Hamas while giving Palestinians hope for a decent life, hope for recognition without violence. We must not view the massacre of October 7 as an act committed by all Palestinians or as an expression of innate hatred of Jews, and we must not conflate it with the Palestinian demand for freedom, which is just. And yet I confess that I too feel the widespread terror and panic that make such distinctions fall on deaf ears. I feel the terror of knowing it could have been me: I could have easily been one of the people who were slaughtered, one of the people kidnapped, one of the people who lost a child or a parent. Like most Israelis, I know people to whom this happened, and I know people whose friends and family were directly affected. I feel the terror, the grief, and the rage; I see these feelings in the eyes and movements of the people I meet; I hear these feelings in their voices.
When terror and brutality are as rampant as they are now, they possess us. Resisting them feels as futile as resisting a force of nature—a giant wave, an avalanche, a blizzard. We are compelled to exercise force by the force that terrifies us. Yet this observation, that we do not possess force but are possessed by it, is significant. It might, in the words of Simone Weil, “interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.” “Where there is no room for reflection,” Weil writes, “there is none either for justice or prudence.”
In The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, published in the winter of 1940, Weil argued that force is the true hero of the Iliad. Force determines human affairs, but it belongs to no one; even when it serves our ends, it is never ours: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.” When force is on our side, it blinds us to the existence of others and to our own vulnerability. Thus, the Iliad describes “men in arms behaving harshly and madly.” A sword driven into the breast of a disarmed enemy pleading at his knees; Achilles cutting the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus “as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.” Under the spell of the force they exercise, these men cannot see that they, too, will succumb to force. “Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.”
In war, Weil says, force takes hold of us and traps us inside the terror of death. It effaces even its own goals as well as the notion of it ever coming to an end. This is not easy to understand. There is a rift between those who look upon war from the outside and those who inhabit it. “To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end,” she writes.
In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.
It is now 9 p.m., Thursday, October 19. The mind is doing violence to itself. We are inside war, inside terror, but we must envision the end of war and terror. We must ask ourselves how we can bring about a reality in which life is possible, and we must accept the unalterable fact that life will not be possible for us unless it be possible for those who share this place with us. In the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Munir Akash:
“It’s either him or me!”
That’s the way war starts. But
it ends with an embarrassing confrontation:
“Him and me!”
There is darkness outside and darkness inside, there is inconceivable loss, unfathomable evil. This land is beautiful and its people are good.
