What Does Destroying Gaza Solve?
The jingoism of some Americans isn’t helping. “Level the place,” advised Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. That “place” has more than two million inhabitants, including about one million children, and I shouldn’t have to remind a senator that when you care about some humans but not others, you’ve lost your humanity.
“If you fire missiles at densely populated areas, you will kill children, and that is what the Israeli military has been doing,” Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch told me. War crimes shouldn’t be avenged by more war crimes.
Many Israelis aren’t in the mood to hear this. They have suffered a shattering blow, among the worst massacres of Jews since the Holocaust. The refrain from Israel is an anguished: But what do you expect us to do?
Fair enough. Everyone expects Israel to hit back. The practical question is how far to go: In the bluntest terms, for Israel, how many dead Gazan children are too many?
Nicholas Kristof.
He shouldn’t have to remind a senator that the murder of children, be they our own or not, is unforgivable. But Americans have all largely fallen prey to aggression toward the ‘other,’ no matter who that might be. Left hates Right. Right hates Left. When compassion for others isn’t practiced, like anything else, it becomes harder, less intuitive, more elusive.
Americans have long been a hateful bunch, tempered by strains of remarkable tolerance and an even more remarkable indifference. But if my own experience is anything, the invective that long festered on the Right has taken root in the Left. We are largely a rudderless people, guided only by the fire of the latest outrage enflamed by the gasoline of social media, not by strong moral convictions or, gods forbid, logic and reason.
Something wicked this way comes.
So delete social media. All of it — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, the insipid platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
All of it.
No excuses.
You know better.
You deserve better.
Go outside. Say hello to your neighbors. Buy someone a drink. Go for a walk in the woods.
Do not let this infection spread.