Those People

I’ve had various versions of this post in draft for months; it’s not that I have nothing to consider or say on what’s happening in Gaza, it’s just that anything I’ve written seems so insufficient in scope and understanding. Equally, I feel my words are just a whisper in the wind especially when so many are speaking forcefully against the war to apparently little effect. However, I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about the nature of evil in the world; it’s so commonplace now and those who commit even the most egregious crimes face few consequences (or are promoted and lauded instead). I have to say something. It may not alter one bit of what’s going on elsewhere; but, if for nothing else, it’s for my own spirit and the few people who read this who might take a moment more to consider.

What is actually happening in Israel and Palestine? Unrest, conflict, struggle, upheaval, war? All these terms have been used for the situation over the past decades. All have subtle shades of intensity and meaning that communicate different things to different people. The same scripted language is used each time there is an intensification and all these terms are used interchangeably as it seems we’ve run out of descriptors to talk about what’s happening. The weight of words like colonisation, occupation, terrorist, invasion and especially right now genocide are slowly eroded away from overuse to the point where horrible things are happening in plain sight of all with seemingly little reaction or import to those of us watching. The attack by Hamas on Israel was not just another incursion and Israel’s invasion of Palestine is not just another response; the observations we make can’t readily reference what’s happened in the past. This is all at a new level of intensity and, potentially, has far greater ramifications outside the region itself.

Our daughter was born the day that Russia invaded Ukraine and though I was obviously occupied with her birth and care in those days following, I was equally concerned with Ukraine and avidly following the news about what was happening. What’s more, I spoke about it with my wife, Rosie and was open about my concerns. However, though I’ve followed the news out of Israel and Palestine in these past months, I’ve not discussed it as freely. Rosie has asked me why this is and challenged me to consider my own preconceptions and response (this touches on her directly as she is Lebanese). I have to check my ego at the door on all this as well; I’m coming from a position of privilege where I can, at arms length, voice some opinion without much fallout. It’s fairly safe for me to say something along the lines of “what Hamas has done is so bad…Israel’s response is bad; people are suffering all round. Let’s all just think about it.” Equally, I can just say that I’m not qualified to speak on it and cop out from the whole discussion. I think though there is a third action that is perhaps, personally, a harder path where, instead of offering up some opinion or just reflexively reacting to what I’m seeing on social media, I try to actually understand the history and reasons behind the situation as it is. I think the more difficult path for me at least is to begin a journey to understand the perspectives involved so I can be in a position to better inform and challenge people beyond the superficial responses they may have to all this.

As I unravel what my thoughts are, I’m aware I’m in a situation where I have the luxury of doing so. People are literally dying as we sit and ponder, while politicians justify and dither, while aid agencies run out of supplies and have to evacuate. Israel is, to my understanding from what seems apparent, responding to a terrible attack on their people with a far deadlier disproportinate invasion of Gaza. (An invasion that has lead to the deaths of many thousands of innocent Palestinian people and I would think ultimately backfire by inciting yet more violence. It’s this kind of thing that, for both sides, turns over another generational cycle of fear, hatred and violence.)

The first thing I want to say is that nothing I’m considering in any way justifies the actions of Hamas some months ago. This seems to be the immediate shutdown of any criticism of Israel’s response; that if one speaks anything ill of Israel, it’s supporting terrorism or that one is somehow antisemitic. It’s just not; sorry, that’s not even a line of argument I would pursue. There are obviously people in Israel that don’t agree that the solution is ‘wipe Gaza off the map.’ It’s idiocy, for those of us away from all this, to think we can’t have other options and have to support some kind of black and white solution when it’s an ongoing debate within the people directly involved. Are Israelis voicing a dissenting opinion themselves antisemitic? Hamas, the organisation, is using the situation of oppression to their own advantage with the flimsy facade of Jihad out in front of them. However, the situation is so much more complex than ‘sides’ or even two clearly opposing forces (which it keeps getting boiled down to in the media and online). People who understand this far more than me would have to chart out all the parties in the region and world who have some hand in the economies, religion, arms and resources pulling in different directions. It’s like a chessboard with all the squares filled with pieces and no room to move. It’s also like a chessboard in the sense that people are getting categorised into white and black pieces. Life isn’t a grid of squares and two opposing teams.

Also, as I said at the start, the expression of evil should have consequences. I’m not saying there should be no account for the incursion Hamas made into Israel that caused the deaths of so many there. I would say though that, in its response, Israel has managed to push that incident so far into the background that it’s unlikely any resolution of it will come other than the whole of Gaza indiscriminately covered in blood. Where there could have been a call to the international bodies who are supposed to resolve these matters collectively (anaemic as their response often is), Israel has actively undermined them and placed themselves squarely in the sights of the International Criminal Court facing the charge of war crimes. I would imagine that whomever planned this within Hamas, if they are even still alive, could not be more satisfied with the result. They knew full well they would not somehow manage to invade or occupy Israel and what the response would be; they were completely satisfied to sacrifice the lives of however many thousands of Palestinian children in the aftermath.

In the middle of all this are just ‘normal people’ literally caught in the crossfire; That’s where we, as ‘normal people,’ have to focus our thoughts. I think one of the things I was blocked on in all this and why I wasn’t talking much about it was that ‘I’m just a normal person.’ I’m not a high level politician or someone who can make decisions to change the situation. People in power (especially people who encourage conflict to remain in power) rely on the fact that, once a major conflict begins, there is little normal people can do to alter the situation. The machine of war, once the gears start turning, is difficult to stop. So normal people fall silent in the background amid all the noise, either by not speaking up from a distance or tragically they are silenced under the weight of broken buildings falling down upon them and their families.

Also, especially in the Middle East, we are so conditioned to respond with ‘well there those people go again.’ It’s normalised; it’s those people. That’s deeply ingrained in my psyche; though at least I’d like to think that I’m aware of it. I’ve had extensive cross cultural training, have led trips abroad, I was even involved with a youth exchange that brought Palestinian kids to the EU. Yet, frankly, I think I was shocked when Russia invaded Ukraine because somewhere inside there was something amiss when this was happening to…white people. Wait, it’s not those people, this is in Europe! This is something that I know is happening in me; it’s conditioned and something that, as a person of privilege, I need to constantly assess (something also for a future post).

I’m just a normal person; I don’t have broad influence in the world. However, if you are reading this, I have some connection to you either personally or through the whims of the internet you’ve come here. Please consider what you, as a fellow human being, must face when you read the news today. Truly, there probably isn’t much you can overtly do to change things. But you can, by some small degree, each day make decisions that collectively push things in a direction where we are not separated as us and those people. There is a conversation at dinner with family where you can either choose to overlook the comment an uncle makes about Arabs (or ‘the Jews’ for that matter) that you could challenge and use as an opportunity to unify rather than further divide.

Some years ago, the day before the exchange I mentioned above began, I wrote this while sitting in a plaza in Antwerp.

Antwerp is a place where, in the heat of European wars between Catholics and Protestants, icons and people alike were burned for what they stood for. Massive churches and cathedrals stand beside each other in peace now; the conflicts of long ago remembered now only in pub names and the engravings on grey statues. Can we somehow look forward to such a future after our current conflicts? Last night, outside the church pictured above, a man juggled knives. That seems to be the history of God in the hands of man; it’s an impressive feat to put all those blades in the air, but make one slip and the wound can be fatal.

Knives are falling all about on the guilty and innocent right now; we don’t need more martyr’s blood to end this. We need better ideas and less fuel to the fire that will just burn civilisation to the ground if we let it keep smouldering underneath. Unfortunately, as happens over and again, conflict comes down to who has the biggest guns or who can kill the most people—who can cause the most terror or who can rule with the power of fear. Carl Jung had a theory about individuals transforming into their own opposite which I think also applies to nations. It was based on an ancient theory called Enantiodromia which states that when something swings to an extreme, like a pendulum, it tends to hurl back to the opposite. This, I think, is amplified by the addition of power, weapons money and fear and all it takes is a little push to send the weight crashing into the most delicate and vulnerable between the two extremes of the arc.

The Essential

Before I begin writing about this, I want to acknowledge, while there is much discussion about the pandemic as a shared catastrophe, it will obviously fall upon us all in very different ways. I’m writing from relatively ‘safe’ Australia where, despite initial fumbles, the authorities and public have quickly adopted measures that seem to have warded off at least the initial hard impact of the virus. Yes, at the biological level we are all equally at risk; however the mitigation of that risk is vastly different depending on your location and/or socioeconomic status. Also, even within the societies that have prepared well and are taking adequate measures, the economic fallout from this will be significant (and ‘significant’ seems too muted a word). I’ve retained full employment and am able to readily work from home; that’s not the case for a tremendous number of people who either can’t do this or who are currently stood down from work in an industry that has closed shop for the duration. 

I say all that because I found myself writing notes for this post and almost romanticising the situation with all manner of hopeful thoughts for how ‘we’ will emerge on the other side. But this was only for the ‘we’ who probably have the resources and protections to endure with some level of safety and comfort. Yes, ‘we’ can talk about all the constraints and limitations we face under lockdown; but the spectrum of that is so broad that it’s easy for ‘us’ not to realise it goes into wavelengths that aren’t even visible to our eyes. I have, for reasons I’ll explain below, been in isolation for the past four weeks so even my perspective of what is happening here in my own city is fairly limited. I will not begin to compare the practical lived experience of someone on the other side of the world with mine even though we are both in ‘lockdown’. There are billions of people who do not have the luxury of considering this with the same level of security I have at this moment. 

Having said that, I think there are universals that can be helpful to consider (both for now and the future). There are very few catastrophes everyone in the world can relate to and to which we are literally not immune. Pick any crisis in the news and, even if you are only one or two steps removed, how easy is it to isolate that as something ‘over there’ and unrelated to you own life (that’s not necessarily a criticism; we must do that in some ways to avoid becoming overwhelmed). Even major regional natural disasters like the Boxing Day Tsunami do not stop the world from operating elsewhere. They disrupt the lives and security of people in that place but leave the rest of us to either ignore or feel a sense of empathy. I’m sensing, at least with myself, I need to cultivate a third way of looking at this. I’m finding myself, in thinking and discussions about the pandemic, still falling into one of those two lines of thought. There is so much to be overwhelmed with that I can’t consider what’s going on in all places and make a sum of it all. However, I’m also starting to compare and contrast the experiences of other people and places with my own and saying ‘well at least it’s not as bad as country X here’ or ‘God, it’s going to be awful in this other place’. Neither of the above are helpful for my psyche and only serve to reenforce the us/them outlook that pervades everything else. 

This is abstract and of course not possible or practical but, at least in my spirit I think I need to strip everything I mentioned before away and just become a human on the Earth at this time. I will continue living and working as I am; this is not the beginning of a desire to become a hermit (though I’m starting to feel like one shut in my flat). But I think, to even begin to hold all this, I have to remove myself from either the weight of worry that I have or the feeling of security and acknowledge that I am neither in control—or entirely powerless. There is a balance point here that may be different in practice for each of us, but that we all have. There is a lot to give over that is beyond our control but at least those limitations, in some ways, make things easer to define. They may be starkly defined but as we settle into whatever these new norms are, they become apparent. Also (again acknowledging my own protections and privileges here), I have increasingly clear notions of what I do control and have agency over. Through all the uncertainties, it’s important to maintain perspective on what’s at hand day to day. 

I was going to write a whole paragraph here about what the next months might look like but it would all be speculation and talking into the air. I don’t know; there are smart people who are trying to model things out, but there are so many overlapping variables I think it’s the best we can do to just shelter in place and be kind to one another. Depending on where you are, there have either been sensible precautions put into place or spectacular failures of leadership. That range is too much to consider in a blog post and, I’m sure, will be unpacked for decades. 

But I do want to think about what follows; that’s almost easier. This is after we have a cure/vaccine in circulation and we are on the path back to whatever ‘normal’ can become again. What I hope for is that positive changes occurring in the midst of this become normalised. These are everything from the small scale interactions I’m having with neighbours to larger societal shifts around working at home, food distribution, welfare, job protections, banking and social safety nets (again, milage may vary depending on where you are). What is a constant, no matter the location, is the sudden shock to the system that there is a particular thing that everyone in every country has to face all at once. I think this can be the enduring and, perhaps, most beneficial outcome of the whole experience. We are facing another global catastrophe in climate change that has been unevenly acknowledged; what, if anything, could act as a better model for responding to that than something like what we are going through now. Not to diminish at all the impact of the pandemic, but it’s basically transitory and something that will be mitigated through known pathways of science and medicine. We’ve know about climate change for decades, the impact is effectively permanent and the remedies are, while apparent, systemic and increasingly difficult to implement. This may provide a model for working together on something that will fall upon us all. It’s a window into what happens if we either choose to act or fail to and face the consequences. 

We are also prompted to examine how our societies are set up, the vulnerabilities of individuals who may already live on the margins and what that means for the whole (in that, if a significant portion of the population are only a step away from either paying rent or not, what does this mean for everything else up the chain). What happens when all airlines close simultaneously? The industry hasn’t collapsed as we assume it will all come back afterwards; but what happens during this hibernation? What changes can we make to protect individuals and the systems we all rely on so that, when this happens again, the uncertainties we faced in the past month are diminished and we have a plan in place (in the same way we practice for fire evacuation in our offices; it may never be needed…but when it is…)? It’s going to lay out clearly also what we must hold in reserve to be prepared for these things and where funding should be focused (here in Australia it might make the difference between our spending billions for a new fleet of submarines for unlikely naval battles or laying up gear and supplies for the situations we face now). 

I think we can also now frankly understand what an ‘essential worker’ is; these are often the people who don’t get the recognition they deserve but in these times stand out and are hailed as heroes. Nurses and doctors are there literally putting their lives on the line. Teachers are staying in schools despite having even fewer protections than health care workers. Then there are people like all the delivery drivers; I’ve suddenly discovered the power of ordering almost everything online and suddenly have a new appreciation for the guy who brings packages to my door!

And, when one contemplates a disease that can literally kill you, the idea of what is personally essential comes sharply into focus. As I said above, I’ve been in at home for several weeks. Part of that time was in medically mandated isolation as we were unsure if I had COVID-19. I presented with similar symptoms and then discovered I was exposed to someone who had the virus; I subsequently tested negative. I did end up in hospital several times (once by ambulance early in the morning). We eventually discovered that I have, of all things, Epstein Barr Virus—which I do not recommend for adults if possible. Nevertheless, I’ve been sicker than I’ve ever been at a peculiar time to be ill. During this time, I’ve had a lot of headspace to consider my connections to others. I’m far away from family and was not able to see friends or loved ones here either. Now, of course, with the social limitations in place, we are restricted to the people who are closest and most dear to us (and even then, we often can’t see most of these people either). I’m not an especially social person to begin with but this is certainly honing down my sense of who is most dear. It gives me a new perspective on people with whom I want to share my life. Maybe, in a shifting and unsettled world, this is the most important thing to hold on to. 

The Constant

I've just yesterday flown back to Sydney from a holiday in the States; as I left the country, the story of the attacks in Paris were unfolding and unfinished. Every news channel in the hotel displayed a barrage of information—'experts' spoke of the social situation in France, issues over immigration and inculturation, economic pressures among migrants, dissatisfaction over political reforms, involvement of the French military in North Africa, the 'War on Terror', various riots in The Republic over the past years, the history of Colonial power, religions intolerance, religious tolerance, freedom of expression, temperance of that expression, a new device that can hold any smart phone in your car's air vent, the upcoming Super Bowl, how the French government should respond, what mistakes were made by French Intelligence, the inevitable surveillance state, and so on. 

Then, I flew for fourteen hours from Los Angeles to Sydney and all that fell silent. Most international flights are, for now, still free of any internet or broadcast news incursion. You've only your own reflections on current events to mull over (my 'entertainment display' was non-functional so I also did not have the selection of films to peruse either). 

All these diverse and discordant voices—everyone has some opinion. Some are willing to voice them; some turn to violent action. How can I comprehend the situation of someone whose life is so different—who has a whole set of values and beliefs that are either many degrees separated or outright antithetical to mine? It takes significant dialogue (and, of course, a willingness to engage in that for both parties). But what, in the human experience of our engagement with one another, is the constant? All discussions and interactions involve variables; some of the elements can be reconciled but the equations seem to be too dynamic in the moments of conflict and confusion. What is the static constant that we all share no matter our culture, history or faith? It's silence; we are forgetting how to respect the silence of our togetherness and risk losing the only thing that we can always hold in common.  

I know that the news is necessary; but I wish, for a given event, there could be an embargo for some time—that the first response, in the face of tragedy, would be silence and time to reflect. The immediate impulse to find blame, identify the early childhood traumas of the perpetrators, or trace the path of money and weapons is not, primarily, the issue at hand. These events all spring from our inability to hold a balanced space together; there is a rupture in society that tears right down through individuals because they can't find a way to hold life on common terms. 

We recognise, after the fact, the necessity of silence; in memorials, in the streets, in Parliaments, there is 'a moment of silence' held by all, no matter what their political bent or religion. We need to find a way to hold silence together beforehand; we need to find these ruptured men and women in their time of injured vulnerability and learn to be silent together; to hold the quiet that leads to a discussion. What they are receiving, instead, is that onslaught of noise and rage from every quarter that drives them into further despair. If every space of mind and spirit is filled with the clamour of so many competing ideologies, there will be no room left for the common silence. What remains for the catalyst of peace? We'll face a future of desperate commentators trying to unquietly uncover why?

Evening in Antwerp

Last night, I went into Antwerp with John and one of the interns, Cammaria. We were to check out a youth hostel for the upcoming Moslem-Christian exchange. Ironically, the hostel is next to a synagogue in the heart of Antwerp’s large Jewish neighbourhood. John approached an Orthodox man on the street and asked if our group might meet with someone from the synagogue (one day in Antwerp is dedicated to a “faith safari;” the city has an extensive religious history). John first mentioned the youth were coming from Israel; however, when he clarified that the youth are from Jaffa and East Jerusalem, the man looked a bit incredulous. He said he would contact us though; hopefully there is an opening for discussion and some civility in the midst of all that’s going on currently in and around Israel. Unfortunately, conflict is a sticky thing that clings to the feet of those who travel. No matter how far one tries to walk away, there seems to always be some vestige of it left. In 1981, in peaceful Antwerp, the Synagogue was hit by a car bomb; I’m sure the wound of that is not forgotten or completely healed. I wonder how the Jewish people living there will react to a group of Palestinians coming into their midst; I wonder what will go through the minds of the Palestinians as they walk through the middle of the Jewish town, surrounded by Orthodox Jews and billboards in Hebrew, to get to our meeting location.

Antwerp is a place where, in the heat of European wars between Catholics and Protestants, icons and people alike were burned for what they stood for. Massive churches and cathedrals stand beside each other in peace now; the conflicts of long ago remembered now only in pub names and the engravings on grey statues. Can we somehow look forward to such a future after our current conflicts? Last night, outside the church pictured above, a man juggled knives. That seems to be the history of God in the hands of man; it’s an impressive feat to put all those blades in the air, but make one slip and the wound can be fatal.