Yesterday I met Abraham.
I met him at the Palestine protest in Hyde Park. I arrived an hour before it started because I simply couldn’t wait around any longer. I had spent the week in an intense anger. I had to do something, go somewhere, and I wanted to be there from the start to the end.
When I got to Hyde Park there were no flags or banners yet, only police. Leading up to the rally the police and the state government had attempted to be as intimidating as possible. Their vague threats clouded every newspaper, considering the use of “special powers” against protesters. Some of these would be illegal searches. Some of these powers were hidden. The premier Chris Minns said the rally would not go ahead. He had not talked to any Palestinian representatives but heavily condemned the rally and all who would attend. This was Operation Shelter. This is protesting in New South Wales, which for years has been the training ground for the large scale police aggression that they could never hope to organise themselves.
There were probably a hundred police when I got there. Groups of eight officers trailed teams of two as cops on horses lazily paraded through the park. No one cared. Families strolled through with their children, who would point at the horses in delight, blissfully unaware of how humiliating it was for the pencil-thin cop slumped on top. Women were sunbathing as large clusters of men with guns and moustaches tried not to be caught staring. Already, an hour before anyone in a hijab would arrive, the New South Wales police force looked like a group of the weird kids finally forced to play outside with the rest of us. As the weird kids we must simply tolerate them, less they get angry and do something stupid.
And then Abraham came up to say hello.
He was decked out head to toe in motorcycle gear. His helmet lazily dangled from his waist where the cops would have had their tiny little guns instead. His jacket was slightly unzipped, proudly displaying a wrinkled chest within a deep, white V neck shirt. He had silver aviators on and smoked Marlboro Golds. He was the coolest old Jew I’ve ever met. He had seen me pacing around the fountain and rightly assumed I was here for the protest. Abraham said he was a Jew from Taree. He had left that morning on his motorcycle. He said it took him three hours to get to Sydney, and like me, his grief compelled him to leave his home and come here, come do something, anything at all, because staying inside and being on the internet was just too horrible.
The three hours that went by were almost all perfect. Palestinian flags soon choked the whole park, with sprinklings of other Arab nations flags in tow. The speakers were Jews, Christians, Muslims and many, many Palestinians. They denounced violence. They made clear, multiple times, that Anti–Semitism was not anti-Zionism, and hatred towards Jews was unacceptable. They spread messages from their families in Gaza. Dozens of Muslims prayed towards Mecca at the same time on a Sunday in the middle of Sydney as me and other Jews chanted “Free, Free Palestine!”. Grandmothers in wheelchairs were given plenty of room. Babies in prams were smiling. It was almost perfect. Almost.
One speech was particularly poor, but then, one speech does not a whole protest make. The speaker talked of the events of last Sunday, when Hamas had broken through the wall imprisoning them and into the towns of Israeli settlers. Hamas did horrendous things that day. They slaughtered Israelis in their homes. They kidnapped hundreds of people to video their murders and post online. Their goal, which was more successful than they could have ever hoped, was to cause attention through violence.
The speech talked of the “white” violence of the oppressor and the “black” violence of the oppressed, which is the violence of resistance by any means necessary. The “white” violence is the violence inherent in an oppressive state, the violence that keeps its existence verified through its enforcement. For the state of Israel, this has been the truth since 1948. But what of Hamas’s actions last week? Is that violence “black” and morally tolerable?
The answer is no. Violence begets violence begets violence. We can all denounce Hamas’s actions whist acknowledging that their existence has formed from decades of Palestinian imprisonment and IDF murder. Abraham and many others with me did not clap for this speech. To create violence out of grief is never the answer. It’s never the answer, because Zionism has shown us so.
The Israeli state was the answer to two questions. After the Shoah, the greatest evil ever seen, many Jews wanted to know, “where do we house our grief?” and for the European powers, the question was “where do we house our guilt?”. The success of Zionism and the creation of Israel was a testament to not just the first safe country for Jews but for the continued success of the European project of statehood. The state of Israel is grief weaponised. It is the final remnant of the long 19th Century, the period defined by the nation and nationalism, a time where the power of the state rivalled the power of God. To turn your grief and pain into a house for violence is never the answer. Like many other European colonies, just like my home in Australia, they set up a new country with new rules and new guns. The problem for them was, people were already living there.
Yesterday was also the day after the referendum. Our country voted against the Voice, and against recognising Indigenous Australians in the founding doctrine of our home. What feels particularly bitter about it all was just how expected it was. Referenda more often fail than succeed but the No Campaign found a brilliant slogan, one that taps into the deep political apathy of this country: “If You Don’t Know, Vote No”. Australia is a country whose political stance is the shrug of the shoulders. A general sense of everything has always been the same and will always stay the same. No bother trying mate. She’ll be right. Just have a beer. Aren’t we the “Lucky Country” after all?
Yesterday people used their grief for The Voice in different ways. Many Indigenous people were calling for a day or a week of silence and many were not. Some non-Indigenous people I know found it as an opportunity to make the failure about themselves. They posted how sick they were and how angry they were, how awful they feel and how their day is ruined, and me, I, is affected and upset by this. This is what social media does to us. The online world demands we make everything about ourselves, even if it has nothing to do with us. You must take everything on and then project it outwards to show that you yourself also suffer. Sending thoughts and prayers is the essence of this attitude. This is not very good for us. We should not make our grief about ourselves.
Apart from making suffering about oneself, the internet does another horrible thing, the worst of which is it makes you a steadfast expert, who is always and unquestionably right on everything and anything. An infographic will do the thinking for you, and then you will demand of others that they inform themselves. I can confidently say there’s a great deal about the history of that conflict I don’t know about. On social media, you do not have that luxury, you know the ins and outs of every struggle and the reason for it.
Here I can say my desire is a two-state solution, where Palestinian people can live in peace, decide their own government, and control their own lives, and the Israeli government can leave them alone. However, I have no idea what a Palestinian state would look like. I do not know the answer to the conflict. Social media forces you to project yourself the final expert to be considered in these matters. The internet is a bad home for grief, because everyone is there, but you’re all alone together, agreeing or disagreeing, where all knowledge is known and unquestioned.
The march on Sunday was a good home for grief. It was a place without violence, without anti–Semitism, where people could gather together to make the grief not about themselves but about those in Gaza. 300 people were expected to attend. 5,000 showed up. I talked with Abraham and many others, who did not know where to put their grief throughout the week.
There are more people in Gaza than Perth and half of them are children. You do not live long there. I had turned my grief about the ignorance of Hamas’s crimes and the savagery of the IDF’s bombings into anger, anger at everyone who said something stupid, who proclaimed they had nothing left to learn, who said that violence and murdering random people at a music festival has a reason and a justification.
The Abraham I met was like me, a Jew. Like us Jews, like Muslims and Christians, we are all according to the Scriptures sons of the first Abraham. The Abraham I met saw Gaza burnt and wept from his home in Taree, because he knew it was not a fair or good thing.
The Abraham in the Testament demanded of God he spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, for whilst some have committed wicked deeds, not all are to blame for the twin cities’ sins. God says he will spare them if ten good people can be found. Abraham’s nephew, Lot, and his family are in Sodom. When angels disguised as humans approach the city, they are met with an angry and fierce crowd. They discover Lot and his family are the only righteous people around, so the family and the angels flee and the city is destroyed by God’s wrath.
Gaza is not Sodom and Gomorrah. What many members of Hamas did was wicked and awful, but like I said, half of Gaza are children. They are innocent people. They do not deserve, could never deserve, to be burnt with fire like God did. Israel does not have the right to weaponise its grief into evil. You do not have the right to turn your grief into an online omniscient expert. You should not make your grief about yourself. Make it about Gaza. About Palestine. Do what you can, whatever you can, to turn your grief into something good.
The Talmud tells us “Whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.”
To save a life is to also save yourself.
Very powerful. Thank you for sharing your thoughtful ideas, and heartfelt emotions. I found you thanks to Freddie deboer. I too have left the retribution road. There is nothing there but death and hatred begetting more of the same.
I started a petition to stop the bombing, turning in another direction in order to shift the narrative.
https://chng.it/CRQ7qw4Gzn
This calls on Pope Francis to go to Gaza, to the Rafah crossing. The dynamics would change immediately as the media could not ignore such a thing.
Thank you for what you wrote.