Collective Grief
We are a world at war. These are wars that promise to destroy ordinary people, trying to live as best they can.
The attacks last week on civilians by Hamas stunned us. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed. At least 150 people have been taken hostage, their fates unknown.
We condemn this violence. We do this with the understanding that we also condemn the violence of Israeli State occupation. We understand that violence only begets more violence. Today, as world powers vow to increase military aid to Israel, the path to mutual destruction dominates any effort to move toward solutions that affirm life.
While we are shocked at the strikes into Israel, we are not surprised. The inhumanity of the Israeli occupation is widely understood, and there have been repeated warnings that the policies of occupation, destruction, and death endured by the Palestinian people would not be suffered forever.
Palestinians have resisted the loss of land, homes, and dignity for nearly a century. Over the last two decades, as the blockade of Gaza has made daily life almost unendurable, people have struggled to create ways forward that embraces peace and life. These efforts by Palestinians for justice and freedom have been supported by allies globally, including people in the US and in Israel. Most of these efforts have failed. Nonviolent strategies such as those calling for boycotts and sanctions on Israel have been thwarted. We all know what happens when dreams are deferred.
Now people are watching as world powers pledge more money for weapons without constraints on the Israeli government’s desire for revenge.
We in the United States bear a responsibility for what is unfolding. Since the founding of Israel, the US has been a consistent partner. In the last two decades our tax dollars have supplied over $150 billion in weapons. U.S. support for Israel is about the only thing our increasingly dysfunctional and fractious political leadership agrees upon. The far right wing of Christian fundamentalists have been especially forceful in encouraging military support for Israel as they see war as essential for the fulfillment of prophesies bring on the “end of times.”
Many people are comparing this moment in Israel to the attack on the US on September 11, 2001. We would all do well to think seriously about this comparison. At that time Grace Lee Boggs asked: “How are we to reconcile with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic, military and cultural domination? Can we accept their anger as a challenge rather than a threat? Out of our new vulnerability can we recognize that our safety now depends on our loving and caring for the peoples of the world as we care for our own families? Or can we conceive of security only in terms of the Patriot Act and exercising our formidable military power?”
At that moment of the “chickens coming home to roost” she asked us to consider, “What will help us recognize that we have brought on our defeats… by our own unwillingness as individuals and as a nation, to engage in seeking radical solutions to the growing inequality” on our globe.
Grace did not leave us only questions but offered a challenge to “grow our souls” by undergoing a “philosophical and spiritual transformation” that begins by acknowledging the interconnection “between our selves and all the other selves in our country and in the world. Each of us needs to stop being a passive observer of the suffering that we know is going on in the world and start identifying with the sufferers.”
Grace’s remarks were influenced in part by those of Starhawk shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Starhawk wrote, “9/11 threw us collectively into a deep well of grief… The movement we need to build now…must speak to the heart of the pain we share across political lines… Faced with the profundity of loss, with the stark reality of death, we find words inadequate. The language of abstraction doesn’t work. Ideology doesn’t work. Judgement and hectoring and shaming and blaming cannot truly touch the depth of that loss. Only poetry can address grief. Only words that convey what we can see and smell and taste and touch of life, can move us. To do that we need to forge a new language of both the word and the deed.”
These challenges are more urgent now than ever. Our collective grief compels us to meet them.