Is Your Hope Alive?
We’ve just seen 1% of a population erased. For three months, we’ve watched indescribable human suffering and untold death before our eyes.
We have woken up each morning to videos grayed out with “Sensitive Content” and the choice whether to see something horrifying that we’ll never forget. Western media and governments know most people can’t stomach this much pain.
In one sense, they’re right: No one can or should have to withstand this much horror.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza has been called the worst “ever seen” by NGO workers, including witnesses of the Khmer Rouge. One Israeli university’s study suggested the rate of civilian deaths is higher than in any world conflict, including those of the 20th century.
This week Israel will defend itself at the Hague for breaking the 1948 Genocide Convention, which post-Holocaust made it a crime to attempt to destroy a people in whole or in part. Those benefitting from the slaughter have been actively trying to get the massive uncensored information dissemination about Gaza in hand.
Besides kids, mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers dying en masse, a central casualty of this conflict is any pretense of the West’s commitment to human rights.
Can we still be surprised?
Apparently, yes. We can still shock ourselves with absolute malevolence and disregard for human life. Parts of ourselves and our beliefs about the world have died alongside those mothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, children, friends.
What makes us human and capable of believing in a future for our planet is being eviscerated or under threat: hope, trust, any certainty of goodness (that the good ultimately wins out). What is the right thing to feel or do now? Have we felt or done all we can? We are clinging to threads of hope if we can find that hope at all.
Many say don’t look away. But how can we live with what we see? Toni Morrison was asked, how do you survive this world whole? In essence, she said, you don’t. It’s about the attempt, and doing something as beautiful as we can manage with the time we have.
The message left by many of the dying in Gaza, and those still living under the bombs: Tell the story. Don’t give up.
What’s the role of individuals during a massacre
In December, I was reading a nativity story to my two-year-old. When she fell asleep, I scrolled and read about five infants whose nurses and parents in Al Nasr Hospital were forced by IDF soldiers to abandon them at gunpoint.
The bodies of the infants were discovered two weeks later, filmed by a Jordanian journalist in a video verified by NBC News. Baby Jesus in his manger, my daughter’s excitement at babies coming into the world, those five decomposing babies together in my mind, I wretched.
Is there an image in the world more lonely than infants dying alone?
It’s not only the bombing that’s intended to inflict maximum destruction. It’s biological warfare as a tool of genocide. Crowded refugee camps, a collapsed sewage and water system, thousands of rotting bodies above ground in the rubble, disease spreading and winter setting in.
It’s nearly impossible to ignore the scale and variety of human suffering and atrocities now even if you wanted to. If you were to only follow the New York Times, CNN or the BBC, you’re still faced with overwhelming images of emotional distress.
We each have to ask ourselves what is the attention and witness we can bring to this historical moment. When asked by future generations: What did we do? How did we act?
It’s fantasy to think the resistance in Europe during the Holocaust and fascist rule was generalized or popular. Most people got on with their daily lives. But some people did stand up. They suffered for it.
The horror feels unending. But the propaganda has also been unraveling.
Despite shadow-banning, accounts deleted, the scale on which people have been engaged in the ceasefire movement is tremendous.
To outdo millions of dollars spent on propaganda, armies of IDF disinformation bots so most Americans are now for ceasefire.
Inevitably some people with interests at stake are going to extreme lengths to justify the bombing and murder of children, including notably, Joe Biden. But it turns out it’s hard to justify murdering children en masse.
The U.S. and EU governments’ support for Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza has been called the widest divergence of government policy from public opinion in memory.
The average person feels nausea imagining infants dying with their entire extended families. 900 entire lineages wiped out, their family names deleted from the registry. It raises the hairs on my head. It’s enough to make you want to just stop entirely. Maybe that’s the answer: a general strike. (That’s a post for another day.)
Realistically that’s what the last months have been: staring at the abyss, often being caught by inaction and horror, feeling often the futility of our individual efforts to do something.
But is it futile?
In our collective outrage, there’s a glimpse of what our world might be instead — and how it could come about.
It’s not about your guilt or how much horror we as individuals can stand.
The personal is where our innermost feelings and soul live, where we experience moral knowing, and our deepest values. But the personal also touches on others. None of us exists as *only* an individual.
Humans have always lived within communities and networks. Our singular acts appear insignificant, but viewed from a distance we see how they are part of a larger whole and connectivity.
We are not alone — we are tied in our moral conviction to everyone we know and have ever known. We’re tied to people far across the world. To people in the rubble. That’s why it hurts.
Greg Stoker, a U.S. veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and anti-imperial content creator, posted a video about how conflict minerals like cobalt travel from the hands of child slaves in the Congo to be strewn over Gaza, since they’re built into guided missile technology in the bombs used by the IDF.
The status quo, and acts of evil, are upheld through systems — but change also happens in systems when the constitutive parts stop operating as usual.
Systems can fall apart. They have, and continue to do so.
“When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.”
— Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize winning novelist
We’ll wake up one morning of our lives and the world will inevitably be different.
The influence of the U.S. and Western Europe will change — that’s already the case.
The West is losing authority in direct proportion to its immorality in full public view on the global stage. The U.S. makes up 4% and Western Europe 2.4% of the global population. We won’t be able to continue to monopolize the world’s resources unilaterally.
In the midst of depression and grief at the state of the world, it helps me to think how much courage it has always taken people to survive. How much courage it takes Palestinians and those in the Sudan, Congo, Ukraine and Armenia.
The story of Palestine is “To exist is to resist.” The inverse is also true. That it’s in the act of resistance that we come alive and begin to be free. Even if that’s just a sit-in in your own damn house to mourn, feel your grief, your own humanitarian pause.
In a search for sources of hope, I downloaded a series of peacebuilding and conflict resolution books. Reach out and I can share a longer list but for now I wanted to share part of The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace by John Paul Lederach (📲◀️link to the entire PDF):
“Change […] requires a creative act, which at its core is more art than technique. The creative act brings into existence processes that have not existed before.
Professional excellence increasingly has emphasized the technology, the technique and the skills of process management as tools that legitimate and make possible training, replication, and dissemination. This is not bad, but it also is not the only source of knowledge, understanding, and sustenance. In the process of professionalization we too often have lost a sense of the art, the creative act that underpins the birth and growth of personal and social change.
Time and again, social change that sticks and makes a difference has behind it the artist’s intuition: the complexity of human experience captured in a simple image and in a way that moves individuals and whole societies.
The challenge of peacebuilding and the moral imagination is precisely what Basho posed for his disciple as he described the challenge of haiku: How do we compose and give life to that which we create?
Aesthetics helps those who attempt to move from cycles of violence to new relationships, and the moral imagination of us who wish to support such movement, to see ourselves for who we are: Artists bringing to life and keeping alive something that has not existed.
This requires certain disciplines from us. Be attentive to image. Listen for the core. Trust and follow intuition. Watch metaphor. Avoid clutter and busy-ness.”
Last thoughts on how we survive
We’ve just been through Christmas and Hannukah in a moment of total disregard for human life. It was impossible to think of the nativity story without also thinking of the children in Gaza.
Recall Herod, a ruler set on murdering all newborns — whose very existence was a threat to his grasp on power.
Children who did nothing wrong. Who were born into an empire.
That other Palestinian, Jesus, born in a manger in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.
In the words of poet/ activist Saul Williams:
“For those under the rubble, […] holding their dead children… God is Alive.”
In history, people have often found hope, and kept going in the face of unimaginable suffering through their belief in the almighty. It’s those closest to the unending death and destruction who somehow still manage to feel God with them.
Whatever accusations Islamaphobes make about Palestinians’ belief in martyrdom, it’s worth noting that not only Islamic tradition suggests death is not an end. (That our souls, angels, and martyrs continue in some sense, and can serve a higher purpose.)
Arabs have been stigmatized, dehumanized and viewed as backward in part due to the depth of their religious beliefs. These beliefs read as strange and Other in a modern secular world.
But this, after all, is the Holy Land.
I went to Israel, Palestine and Jerusalem in 2018 and was struck by how truly disconnected we must be in the West — how had I not thought much about the old city of Jerusalem housing the holiest sites of all three Abrahamic religions? The Wailing Wall, formerly the Temple of Jerusalem; the Sacred Mount, Calvary Hill, now the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Jesus was crucified; and the Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed ascended to heaven.
Christianity became a dominant religion in the West in tandem with the fall of the Roman empire. It was a religion founded by martyrs. (Judaism also traditionally believes in martyrs, as part of Kiddush Hashem.)
Saint Paul (whose letters make up much of the New Testament) was first a highborn Jewish rabbi in the Temple of Jerusalem before it was ransacked in 70 AD by the Romans. What remains of the temple is now the Western or the Wailing Wall.
During this brief period, between Jesus’ death, and when the Romans crushed the Jews living in Jerusalem — Saint Paul wrote to comfort his community still living under the Roman Empire: “Brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death — so you will not grieve like the rest, who are without hope.” (Thessalonians 4:13)
The horror and oppression of empire is not new.
Jesus was crucified by the Romans as a Jewish revolutionary. His teachings were seen as inciting an uprising. He was a threat as an increasingly popular leader of an ethnic minority in a backwater of their empire.
The Roman empire did eventually end. But strange as it is, it was first infiltrated from the inside by the weird new religion that came about in reaction to their empire’s cruelty and violence against the innocent. (For more on the history of the early church and empire in the holy land, I recommend French journo-novelist Emmanuel Carrere’s The Kingdom.)
The purpose of this newsletter is not religious, whatever that means. (Though my friend Konstantin tells me “Time on Earth” sounds like an evangelical newsletter, and it does sound like that??)
As
put it in “The Power of Focused Intention” back last November: “the energies of small groups can be harnessed for healing ourselves, others, and the world.” Maybe it doesn’t need to be more than that.We’re living in a moment of direct, uncensored access to massacres. It’s the Bardo, waiting for a new world to be born.
To survive this and choose a course of action, we can turn to the ways people have survived and made sense of the continuation of life despite horrific cruelty and empire in the past.
What does decolonization look like to you?
What can you still find faith and hope in?