From within the moral abyss
In Tel Aviv people are are blocking streets to make the war crimes stop.
This is a short post, but it felt like a necessary one. Last night, thousands of people took to the streets in Tel Aviv, blocking intersections, demanding that the destruction, starvation, and ethnic cleansing of Gaza end. It is, of course, not enough. But then again, what could be? Hundreds of thousands of people all around the world have protested against Israel’s atrocities over the last twenty-two months. Nothing has stopped the gears of war from grinding on nor ended widespread Western backing for Israel’s unspeakable crimes. In an age where mass demonstrations have revealed only their political impotence, it is easy, then, to discount the significance of protest. It is only logical, in light of all that has happened in the last two years, to despair.
But the reason I am sending this, the reason why I want you, reader, to see these images, is that if there is to be any decent future for this place, for the Israelis and Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, it will not be enough for the world to do its part, as it should: to bring the full weight of international and diplomatic consequences onto the Israeli government; to force Israel through economic means to end its domination of the Palestinians, its occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza. It will also be necessary for those people of conscience who remain here to push as hard as they possibly can. That is no easy thing, certainly not under the current conditions of repression from above and fascist psychosis from below.
And yet, last night people still did. Israelis put their bodies on the line, faced down armed police and a hostile public: to shatter the denialism that has gripped this country; to protest, in the most literal sense of the word, the atrocities being committed in their name; to leave a record that there were, in fact, people who resisted this, who demanded that it stop. I am not writing this because I believe that some righteous minority can redeem the sins of the majority, or simply because I think it is important that there be a record of the fact that there were people who resisted this genocidal war (although I do think that is important). Instead I am writing this because I still believe, perhaps against my better judgment, in that old activist slogan—that where there is struggle, there is hope. That where several thousand stand, there are tens of thousands of others who, if they could—if they were less afraid, less exhausted, less defeated—would stand with them. And that more, too, might join.
In other words, I am writing because these brave people gave me hope. Not optimism, not any kind of judgment grounded in realism or rational analysis, but hope—that most irrational of feelings in these darkest of times. I do not know what it will take for us, the Jews who live in this land, to climb out of this tremendous moral abyss. I do not know how it will one day be possible to reach some kind arrangement in which Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs live as equals. But I remain absolutely convinced that any such arrangement will have to be the work of the people who actually live here, and whose children and grandchildren will face the task of cohabitation in a land claimed by two peoples. And if, one day, such an arrangement is made, it will be in part because there were people—however marginal or strange—who held out the possibility of another way when there was almost nobody else willing to do the same.
“It is, of course, not enough. But then again, what could be?“
There are many things people in Israel could be doing to stop the genocide beyond these protests. I think you’re very much aware of that, as you spent all of 2024 agitating AGAINST the people abroad who tried to escalate through direct actions. Isn’t it telling that the relatively benign acts of sabotage that have occurred in the western countries have yet to emerge at any scale amongst the Israeli activists? You couldn’t even bring yourself to call it a genocide until it was far too late, a cowardice that comes off less as a mea culpa and more as a preventive defense for the tribunals you know you may possibly be placed in front of.
You made your bed, Josh. Sleep. We don’t want you back.
how do people envisaged the hostages will return? Hamas held on to two captives for ten years ie for seven years when Israel committed neither war nor crime, ignored their constant rockets and facilitated Qatari funds. Hamas will not give the hostage unless forced to