Every person is unique. Every experience is unique. When experience in the present turns into the past, historians process the past into history. Most of us engaged in this work feel an obligation not to lose the uniqueness of the many experiences of an event as we try to make meaning. But as the scale of events demands larger meanings, both the uniqueness and the equivalence of loss is too easily lost.
One year ago: 7 October 2023
This young man, whose picture we have often seen, was Hersh Goldberg-Polin. His face and his name are well known because his American parents campaigned so publicly for his release. He was captured by terrorists on 7 October a year ago and with five others was murdered, deliberately executed by terrorists, after almost a year in underground captivity.
The executioners wanted to make a point about equivalence. Not a calculus about these six hostages in return for forty thousand Palestinian dead, but to show that the battered resources of Hamas could still inflict a kind of equivalent power to the might of the Israeli military.
That military might, Israelis are reminded daily, has no equivalent in the Middle East. That military might, Israelis will remember, failed them on 7 October. It was absent when Hersh lost an arm to a grenade during the raid, when 250 innocent people, most of them having a good time at a music festival, were brutally taken hostage.
The horrible equivalence of terror was already demonstrated that day when more than 1,200 were massacred in their homes and parks and gardens. Old people growing vegetables, young girls dancing to a band—none were protected. That was the point.
For most people, empathy is both natural and subject to training. Do I feel closer to Hersh because I once shared some of his life experience? Can I not feel close to the girls who were abused and raped because I am not of their gender or experience? Close, but not equivalent. I can identify with the old people who were killed or captured after years of campaigning for the rights of Palestinians; I can barely comprehend the will power required to hold out in poor health as a hostage.
The year since
In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas terror attack President Biden warned Israeli politicians not to make the same mistake the United States had made after the 9/11 attack on New York. They did not listen. They spoke openly about revenge.
A year later they have invaded Lebanon and declared that there is no place in the Middle East that is safe from Israel’s precision strikes. Iran should note what is meant by a precision strike: devastation of whole city blocks, health facilities, and thousands killed or rendered homeless. Beirut could be left another Gaza, as could Tehran.
Today there are new images of horror from renewed bombing of ‘safe zones’ in UN compounds. Again, a mother weeping over her newborn baby, a lost boy instantly without a mother. I cannot forget a girl in hospital staring at me on the screen. Only when the camera moves down do we see that she has no legs, only bandages.
Have we lost the ability to feel compassion for the casualties and families? The rows of shrouded bodies outside a half-wrecked hospital, some very small. A father showing us his beloved child; now he is carrying it to its grave.
Today’s reporting from Israel reminds us that public polling shows most Israelis are sealed off from the realities of their government’s actions in occupied Palestine, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank. The killing of civilians, of aid workers, of hospital patients does not move them. A Jewish journalist opposed to such actions reports that opinion, so against Netanyahu for most of the year, is now hardening in his favour. Israeli media do not dwell on the casualties of Israeli bombing.
It is Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Four days after 7 October it will be Yom Kippur. How many Jews will be asking forgiveness?
Taking responsibility
If pressed, many Jews – not only in Israel – will resort to equivalence: it is the other side, the murderers and hostage-takers, who should be asking forgiveness. They do not take responsibility for all the decades of oppression that resulted in the terror attack. Nor do we. Britain, as well as the US, continues to supply weapons and to stand by Israel against world opinion. Australia follows along and will not even allow the word genocide to be broadcast without a caveat that the International Court has yet to decide. As Owen Jones asks in The Guardian, “What atrocity would Israel have to commit for our leaders to break their silence?”
There have been new records in purposely inflicted suffering set here. I ask: where, this year, has the human feeling for others gone? Why have we in our families, loving our children, lost any sense of equivalence?
My work compels me to ask such questions, not on one day but every day. Genocides and crimes against humanity are so thick on this screen I cannot scrape them off. The Cloud is not large enough to bury them. All such crimes depend on false equivalence: ‘look what they (Armenians, Jews, Tutsis) did to us. We have to save those closest to us from the threat the others pose to our people.’ Where in this is Anne Frank or the bandaged girl in Gaza? Both, like Hersh, had their lives before them.
Dialogue across difference
I am starting to lose faith in the ability of writing, of television, of social media to penetrate the prejudices of tribalism. We know from our own societies how the most vivid depictions of suffering – from Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine – cannot retrieve compassion from wherever it has gone to sleep.
In the United States, I learned this morning, a Jewish intellectual and his Arab colleague have embarked on an 11-month road trip trying to foster ‘dialogue across difference’. They will try to persuade people across their divided country that the worst of outcomes, repaying one atrocity with another, does not have to be the inevitable way.
Their project made me think of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra founded 25 years ago by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. Even this year it will perform in Germany and in London, at the Royal Festival Hall. Here there is true equi-valence: equal values shared. This must be the most fitting way to remember the horror of one music festival disrupted by terror, repaid with music made in human solidarity and hope.
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