You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.
Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now.
I like Bari Weiss. I admire her integrity, her commitment to journalistic ethics, and the compassion and curiosity she shows interviewees and guests. (Strangely, nothing enrages my more liberal friends than saying I admire Bari Weiss - a fellow liberal.)
I was listening to the recent episode of her podcast with Michael Oren and I found some of their language to be…unsettling. One part in particular, when they mention a “clash of civilizations,” and Michael says no, this is not a clash of civilizations, this is a clash between civilization and barbarism.
This. This is precisely why I can’t get onboard with much of the rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Do I condone the attacks on Israel? Absolutely not. But how on earth can anyone refer to their own culture (in this case, Israel) as “civilized” when they let such suffering happen just over the border in Palestine?
While I can’t begin to feel it myself, I understand the anger Israelis must feel. Many Palestinians, including Hamas, the “government” of Gaza, want to wipe Israel off the map. That’s a bit different than “kill all the Jews,” but it’s not an arbitrary distinction. I have Palestinian friends that feel as though their homes were stolen from them when the State of Israel was formed in 1948. I feel for them. I also have Israeli friends that have profound and lasting generational trauma from the Holocaust and so many other despicable, horrific attacks on Jewish people over the last, well, if we’re honest, many thousands of years. I feel for them, too.
But a civilization as I define it is a relentless, dogged pursuit of peace, of justice, of fairness, of civility. The arrogance of throwing a rave on the border of the Gaza Strip? To literally throw a party just over the fence from Gaza? Sorry, but the optics of that are terrible. Talk about arrogance…
Civilization is the pursuit of justice for all, not just those that think or believe as we do. Trust me, I get how endlessly frustrating-bordering-on-enraging it is to always try to be fair to those that don’t themselves practice fairness. (I, a gay man, must accept the strangeness of both caring for the Palestinian people…and recognizing that many among them would want me dead.) But there is no other option.
This commitment to principle in the face of an irreconcilable reality? This is the bedrock foundation of a civilization.
Barbarism is not just the slaughter of innocents, but allowing innocent people to suffer because of your own cultural indifference. And I say this as an American. The suffering that takes place around the world because of my own culture’s indifference is staggering.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that indifference wherever and whenever we see it. Israel is a bastion of many good things in the world. But like America, should they allow their neighbors to suffer, no matter how much those neighbors might hate Israel? If so, is Israel — are we — civilized?