Americans, Weary of foreign conflicts, face another
Los Angeles, California, mother of two children, and an elderly man’s friend whose faith drives her to Israel, Israel and Hamas
Aziza Hasan, a devout Muslim, looked out at the group gathered around her, spoke of the loved ones who had died in Israel and Gaza and began reciting the first chapter of the Quran.
“On my right side is Gabrielle, God’s strength,” she told the crowd, translating the song. “Behind me, God’s healer, Raphael. God is above my head.
On this late afternoon of Oct. 15, the war between Israel and Hamas was well underway as Ms. Hasan and Ms. Hodos sat on parched grass at a bustling park six miles west of downtown Los Angeles. Jews and Muslims are surrounded by each other.
Everyone on hand was part of NewGround, a nonprofit fellowship program that has helped more than 500 Los Angeles Muslims and Jews learn to listen, disagree, empathize with one another — and become friends.
In rural Lone Rock, Wis., where the harvest season meant more than one long workday on Thursday, a dairy farmer said the president’s appeal for military aid was going to be a hard sell.
Mr. Schmidt owns the largest dairy farm in Richland County, a swing district that had voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1980, until 2020, when voters there went for former President Trump’s re-election.
“I mean, money comes hard here,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s been a relatively tough year of farming for us. I think we support Israel, but I couldn’t believe we couldn’t do more.
In suburban Milwaukee, however, the questions posed by the violence in the Middle East and Ukraine were less economic than moral for Janet Lucas. She said that the attacks by Hamas against Israelis triggered her.
“I understand that there has been an ongoing dispute between the two for a long time,” Ms. Lucas said. The way that it was handled recently made me broken hearted, she said. “It took me back to 9/11 — the same feeling, the same fear of, you know, is it going to happen to us, or who’s next?”
On Friday she went to Holy Hill, a basilica on a wooded hillside, a country drive away from her community, to take in the fall colors with her son, Michael, who was in town from Florida. As African Americans, they said, they felt conflicted about the president’s call to side with Israel. They sympathized with the Palestinians and what they saw as the long discrimination they had gone through.
Janet Lucas said she can see both sides of it when she sits in the middle. “And then I also think, is there another way, could the United States or any other country get involved to help them to come to some form of peace?”
Israel, Gaza, Palestine: What Have You Done? David Myers — An op-ed by a Jewish History Professor at UCLA
It can be hard to let go of the sense of uselessness when watching a horrible thing happening far from your house, but that same feeling can also be felt by your friends and neighbors.
The war in Israel and Gaza has created this web of shared grief connecting friends and strangers. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, my neighbor worried about her family in Israel, and she was having a difficult time locating them.
The Jewish students were mourning the loss of a friend when I first came into contact with them. Some students whom I’ve taught in the past, including a class on Israel-Palestine. I have a Palestinian American colleague of mine that I talk to when they’re doing well and they are in a state of complete shock.
Yet I happened upon an op-ed by a professor of Jewish history at UCLA. His name is David Myers. He wrote for the campus paper, trying to stake out some middle ground, where Jews and Palestinians on campus could safely stand and grieve for one another.
I reached out to him to see if he was willing to talk about that idea. I also craved a long view. A take from a historian. Because perhaps, with distance, the pain is lessened? It became clear very quickly that historians fix their gaze in the past, but they live with us here, now, in this present moment, and it can be too much to bear.
David says that it’s been very difficult. My heart is broken. I’m grieving, mourning, angry, bewildered, and scared. And I realize I’m not there. I am not in Israel-Palestine. I’m at the door. So what must it be to be there on the ground? I work there a lot and I spend a lot of time there. I’m feeling it. It’s nearly unbearable. I spend my time teaching, doing media appearances, and then disappearing back into a cave of depression.
Martin: How did things start to evolve on campus? Because UCLA, like many college campuses around the country, has been beset with a lot of students who are angry, who are hurt, who are suffering, who want justice for all the people who’ve lost their lives. How did you see all of that emotion start to manifest and bubble up?
Myers: I think what I encountered was a great deal of mystification about how students on the other side of the divide failed to understand where they were. It was much less about, “Can you help me understand what took place in geopolitical terms?” and more about, “How could that group be so uncomprehending and so lacking in basic empathy?”
Myers: I did. There are two types of people in these groups: those who are supporters of Israel who are Jewish students and those who are supporters of the Palestinian cause who are not.
I think both bear within them a deep sense of grievance. The Jewish students feel like they are being colonized by the progressive left because they did not condemn a massacre of Jews. The supporters of the Palestinian cause feel that the US political culture is not paying enough attention to the plight of the Palestinians.
“His call for empathy has made this professor feel isolated”: “Israel-hamas-palestinians-gaza-religion”
When I decided to write something that made the simple and intuitive claim that now is the time for recognition of the humanity of all, it was clear that I had to. Now is not the time, at least for me, to take sides.
I knew that that would elicit many suggestions that I was a traitor to my people, the Jewish people. And I knew it would elicit many claims that I failed to understand the depth of suffering of the Palestinian people. I had to write what I had to say. And I believe it’s not only intuitive, it’s the moral place where I need to be.
Which is to say, it is an absolute moral imperative to condemn without equivocation the massacre that took place on October 7th. And it is a moral imperative to attend to the extraordinary suffering that Palestinians in Gaza are now undergoing, and that the two are not exclusive of one another.
In the best of times, people often feel the need to choose sides. It’s understandable why people feel like they can’t hold on to both. But I guess I would ask: Is there not a small portion of our hearts that can be reserved for the other, even in this time of grief?
I don’t consider myself to be a morally better person than the average, but I do think it’s important to try to in such moments, as a manifestation of our humanity, carve out a small portion that can allow us to empathize.
Source: His call for empathy has made this Jewish studies professor feel isolated
How Does Violence In Israel Interact With the Psalms? Myers: Where Do We Stand? How Do You Get Your Feelings? How Have You Been?
Part of your job as a history teacher is to look back through time and identify patterns and teach students how to break the ones that do not serve us anymore, right? As people, as societies, as humankind. How do you do that in this conflict when the same cycles of violence repeat themselves over and over for generations?
He said, “Myers.” Yeah. And those cycles are rooted in profound traumas, which in some sense clashed with one another. The displacement and expulsion of millions of Palestinians during the 1948 war is traumatizing to most people. I guess the best way to ask yourself how it is going is to ask your own questions, Rachel. How well is it working? And I think from what we’ve seen over the last two weeks, it’s not working well at all. That kind of death embrace of two siblings, I often think of them as Jacob and Esau, is detrimental to the health of both.
Myers: It’s a very tricky question, in part because I take solace in prayer and in prayer in community. This is a period of time in which I don’t feel like I fit in with my community and I feel that they don’t feel like me. I feel like I know what many of you are feeling at the moment, just extraordinary loneliness.
I see that the Psalms offer some sources of solace. We might be able to move beyond where we are. And every day we say a verse, which I wrote down, because I carry it with me now. It says: “You turned my feelings into feelings of joy.” You girded me with joy, undid my sackcloth.
