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.
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Just from your article it would appear this was an excellent book, one which I think I will pickup and read. And yes, though I look at the death of Kirk as just one of the losses on September 10th (that we appear to celebrate, honor, and moan about while ignoring the bigger picture of an average of 117 gun deaths per day), we are missing the bigger picture and have not realized we very well may be involved in a wasteful struggle similar to the IDF/Palestinian struggle. Thanks for the article; thought provoking!
It took me a lifetime. I took me a lifetime of reading and listening and developing personal connections to understand how I’d been propagandized.
I grew up reading Leon Uris’ Exodus. Watched the tragedy unfold at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Celebrated the daring success of the Raid on Entebbe. I believed in the egalitarian vision of the kibbutz. I was more than willing to support the only democracy in the Middle East that held firm against dictators trying to destroy it.
It was all lies and propaganda.
While all of that might have some element of truth at the time, it no longer is the case.
The modern state of Israel is the West’s penance for ignoring the plight of European Jews leading up to World War II. And in the effort to atone for that sin, we have created an sin that step by step and moment by moment looks a lot like the ghettos of pre-war Europe. Separate enclaves with second-class citizens.
The 1947-48 war for independence looks no different in hindsight than the militia terror seen in Bosnia or the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar or Russia’s annexation of Mariupol and Crimea. It looks no different in hindsight than our own sins of driving the Cherokee out of Georgia because they occupied the land and white people wanted it.
We have been gaslighted for years that Israel wants peace. It doesn’t. If it did it would just stop. It would just stop stealing Palestinian land.
Thank you so much for articulating this point of view. I’m stunned, on a daily basis, by the impunity with which Israel carries our its murders. There was an article in the online Christian Science Monitor this past week about an Israeli television journalist who has been forbidden to report on what is happening in Gaza. It baffles me. Can the Israelis not hear the jets going overhead and the blasts from the bombs?
Thank you, Jeffry Berner, for your response. It says it all and saddens me.
Came to the conclusion many years ago, that Israels’ case was more propaganda than truth. As the strongest and most militaristic nation in the Middle East, they sold the poor, little Israel, all alone with all those terrible monsters surrounding them, line of thinking and the US, possibly in its’ guilt from the government actions/inactions of WWII, swallowed it bait and hook and all. I cannot condone, nor excuse the horrors of WWII, but to watch the Israeli government operate with the same level of anger, rage, and discrimination, and sublimation, toward the Arabs, be they Palestinian or organized Arab nation, is inexcusable. And our complicity is also inexcusable. Oh, and by the way, regarding repression of the press, don’t look to hard at what is transpiring all over this country and especially with the death of Charlie Kirk, I’m hear something akin to “Juden Aus” in the coming hunting down of “liberal” non-American enough organizations. See where that’s going. Huh, huh, seen if before, huh, huh. Don’t look too closely, it can happen here.
The is a good time to support the League of Women Voters; before that organization is shut down and ‘disappeared’.
Small steps of resistance count.