This commentary is by Felicia Kornbluh, a professor of history at the University of Vermont with appointments in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and in Jewish studies.
Like a lot of Jews around the world, I’m barely sleeping these days. In fact, I’m writing now at 4:30 a.m., and only because my brain started working, unbidden, a little before 4.
I don’t want to be here, wracked with grief, triggered, terrorized, traumatized, afraid. Consumed with events in the Middle East and worried about people I know. Powerless to defend Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, in ways that might ensure its survival or shape its destiny. And powerless to shape its politics as it pursues a war that has already taken hundreds of civilian lives and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee with almost nothing.
What I’m not, thankfully, is confused about what happened on Oct. 7: Members of Hamas, the Iranian-backed movement that has controlled the Palestinian territory Gaza for two decades, slaughtered close to 1,300 Israeli civilians and soldiers. It was an especially brutal blow because it occurred on a Sabbath morning at the very end of the High Holy Day season.
Religiously observant people were marking Shemini Atzeret, the eighth day of the holiday Sukkot, and preparing for Simchat Torah, the celebration of the Hebrew Bible at the close of one year’s reading cycle on the cusp of the Israelites’ entrance into the land promised them — the conclusion of the book of Deuteronomy — and then embracing the drama of the founding of the world at the start of a new cycle with Genesis.
Endings and beginnings: The victims included children and their parents, peace activists and humanitarians, secular and religious Jews, and about 260 young people who were ending the holiday season with a rave in the desert dedicated to joy and peace.
I am of a generation for whom learning to identify with the state of Israel was a foundational part of being raised as a liberal American Jew. Although I always pay a little attention to Israeli politics, in the past year in particular I’ve been glued to my spectator seat, as a far-right-wing government came to power there, with powerful coalition members saying disgusting things about Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel and promising to demolish women’s and gay rights.
A mass democratic movement rose in response and sustained itself over an impossible-seeming period of time. The thousands of Israelis in the streets, at least once a week for nine months, were divided in their approach to Israel’s longstanding occupation of Gaza and the other Palestinian territory, the West Bank. But they were fiercely supportive of the institutions of civilian government that are essential to making any progress toward the amelioration or end of that occupation.
They were the hope — “Hatikvah,” the name of the Zionist poem that is Israel’s national anthem — of a democratic future, a society that might someday find its way forward toward a sustainable peace.
The mass democratic movement in Israel is no more. Its infrastructure has been turned into a mass civilian support system for recovery and war — giving blood, making sandwiches, sending equipment to the ragtag military units that formed in the first hours and days after the Hamas attacks, raising money for Israelis whose homes and communities and psyches have been demolished.
Also gone, for the foreseeable future, is the promise of peace represented by direct negotiations among Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States — negotiations that seemed to be headed toward Saudi recognition of Israel’s right to exist (a major milestone even 75 years after Israel’s founding), and might have laid the groundwork for changes in the occupation that would have improved Palestinians’ lives.
As a historian, I know a lot about the factors that led to the creation of the modern state of Israel, and to the Palestinian Territories. It is a grim history, with blame and pain, death and grief, enough to go around. None of this justifies what Hamas members did in Israel; slaughtering civilians in their beds and burning their homes is not a meaningful form of political action.
What Hamas did was terror, and not, as some of my intellectual colleagues would have it, revolution. This was a series of actions more akin to what the El Salvadoran military did in the famous massacre at El Mozote — killing nearly 1,000 and designed to terrorize — than to the various anti-colonial movements to which some left-wing Americans have compared it. It was akin to the U.S. military’s worst actions, for example in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, where perhaps 500 were killed. And it was far worse, in terms of the numbers killed and injured, than the longest-remembered pogroms, moments of mass violence enacted against Jewish communities in Europe in the decades before the Holocaust.
From terror to tragedy: The predictable, and perhaps intended, result of this attack on Israelis is a large-scale and destructive war, a war that will inflame and embitter relationships among Israel and its neighbors, possibly for generations.
How many will Israel’s government now kill, either by military action or through the destruction of hospitals, lack of water and electricity and other basic services? How many thousands, even millions, will be displaced? Where will people go? When and how will it end?
The Book of Isaiah promises that we, the Jews and by extension all humanity, can learn to beat our swords into plowshares — in other words, to turn the weapons of war to constructive and communal ends. We can reach a time, it promises, when we don’t have to “learn war any more.”
Hamas started this war with its brutality. Right now, the plowshares are being beaten into swords. As a Jew who cares and watches from afar, I can only hope that the conflict is brief, that Hamas is defeated, and that the people who live in Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and neighboring countries won’t have to learn war again for a very long time.
