Nothing Left but the Killing?

As news of the murder of Charlie Kirk came, I was in the final pages of Lawrence Wright’s remarkable book, The Human Scale. It is a novel, an historical novel, set in contemporary Israel. It culminates with the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. The book is an incredible achievement by Wright, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

As the title suggests, Wright’s intent is to take his readers inside the Israel/Palestine conflict at the human scale and level via particular characters, their intertwined lives, and how that conflict and violence impact them all.

Among the characters are an Arab-American from New York who has gone to Israel for a family wedding; an aging, jaded Israeli cop whose wife has recently died of cancer; his adult daughter who is visiting from her university in Paris and a thirty-something Palestinian man, Jamal, who has been peace activist, committed to Gandhian non-violence. There are many other characters, both Israeli and Palestinian. Wright conveys how every single one of them is trapped in and by the violence, the intractable conflict, the hatred, and cycles of repeated violence.

Toward the novel’s end the Palestinian peace activist, Jamal, is being pursued by the Israeli army for a murder of an Israeli police chief, a murder he did not commit. Jamal has been given protective shelter by a family in Gaza. As the family sleeps, the IDF target Jamal with a rocket shot from a helicopter. The rocket kills the entire family, including three children, but somehow not Jamal. Here’s an excerpt from hours after that attack.

“And yet he had escaped. He could not get out of his mind the sensation of being wrapped in the funeral shroud, suspended between life and death like a zombie aware of his own demise . . . He imagined the primitive certainty that the warriors of past times must have felt as they raced through the desert, with cries of conquest and vengeance and no thoughts of peace. Part of him yearned for that certainty, the willingness to kill or die for a cause, to see life in bold contrast between good and evil, and to know which side he was on. Not to reason with his enemies but simply to destroy them.”

Wright goes on: “He understood the fallacies of such thinking. Reconciliation demanded strength he didn’t have . . . What good had his struggle done anyone? Here were his cousins, imprisoned in this claustrophobic ghetto, one generation after another, as periodic peace talks took the stage, then dissipated like mirages in the desert . . . Would the Holy Land always be a field of battle in the name of God?”

At about the time I read those words I received the news of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In what felt like almost a moment of revelation, I realized that I had been reading of Israeli’s and Palestinians and the novel’s characters, like Jamal, from a distance. At some level I was thinking, “How horrible to be trapped in such an all-consuming conflict where you see no alternative but to take one deeply flawed and implicated side or the other.”

And then it hit me: Is that us? Is this where we in America now are, or where we are rapidly heading? Two sides where our comfort — if it can be called that — is “to see life in bold contrast between good and evil and to know which side ‘we’ are on. Not to reason with enemies but simply to destroy them.”

A chill took hold of me as the distance from which I had read collapsed. We like to think, we want to think, “it can’t happen here.” But the truth is that it can.