This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible.

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August 6, 2006 at 10:33 am | In meaning in life, humanize, friends |

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Danny Zuckerbrot – on the Mideast Crisis

I am a Jew and a child of the holocaust. That means that most of the grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and family friends I might have known were cruelly tortured and killed before I was born. It means I grew up knowing the scars on my father’s body, the memories left by the whips of the concentration camp guards. I knew his limbs twisted from their beatings. It means I will never forget the numbers tattooed into his arm that marked him as a slave, and less than a slave. It means I will always remember the nightmares that haunted his dreams.

It also means that I am descended from people whose neighbors in every generation for hundreds of years have turned on them in pogroms, and massacres. Before Columbus sailed, we were driven from Spain. Two centuries before that from England. It is a story of exile and rejection that has been two thousand years in the telling; nor has it ended. In the tranquil and tolerant city where I grew up there were places with signs that said no Jews or Dogs.

I understand those who cannot trust their well being even to their apparent allies. I know in my bones who it is that will end up being the scapegoat, the fall guy, the accused. I am a Jew, in the same way that I am a part of the family I was born into. And I find myself one of those who asks; why didn’t they protest when a thousand missiles where launched at us from our neighbors house?

I feel all that is true and I ask myself isn’t it right to defend yourself? Isn’t it right to defend your children?

I have no wisdom to illuminate this situation only this register and this observation:

I have to defend my children, my family, my people. But who are my children? Who are my family, and my people?

My heart is pierced by every bullet that rips apart that one who, like me, simply finds themselves thrown into a game they didn’t choose. I am torn apart with every single person who cowers in fear or shakes their fist in helplessness. Even if I would, the tears I shed for that child cruelly slaughtered by a bomb don’t know how to distinguish between Jew and Muslim, between white or black, or Hindu or Sikh.

This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible.

18 Comments

It is so cruel, the Israeli attacks on Lebanon. It crosses the line when they bomb parts of Beruit that are Christian, where Hezbollah has virtually no presence or support. They are killing children. People practising that religion certainly may have suffered in the past, but that is not any excuse for wanton actions that are killing innocent civilians. Should Native Americans be granted license to kill the spawn of those who invaded and occupied their homes, killing and displacing them in the process?

The Arabs probably feel that they also are entitled to defend themselves, their homes, and their children. No religious group has a monopoly on the right to self-preservation.

The pain, the loss of human life, is staggering and cannot be justified by appeal to extreme bad luck in history.

Comment by Kejii Fujowara — August 7, 2006 #
Could you do me a favor and re-read the piece again? The whole thing. Please feel free to comment again after reading it. Thanks.

Comment by ted — August 8, 2006 #
I disagree with Kejii. Israel is entitled to defend itself and cannot be fettered by the frivolous moral concerns that are a luxury of the bourgeoisie.

Comment by Bepah Benoweh — August 8, 2006 #
Bepeh, could you do me a favor and re-read the piece again? The whole thing. Please feel free to comment again after reading it. Thanks.

Comment by ted — August 8, 2006 #
But I did read it. The author is not exactly making a clear statement. It is nice to express precious sentiments from a distance. But Israel is involved in a life and death struggle. Israelis don’t have the same luxury to wax rhapsodic about how upsetting violence is. Nature is red in tooth and claw.

/just saying

Comment by Bepah Benoweh — August 8, 2006 #
To me he’s very clear:

“My heart is pierced by every bullet that rips apart that one who, like me, simply finds themselves thrown into a game they didn’t choose. I am torn apart with every single person who cowers in fear or shakes their fist in helplessness. Even if I would, the tears I shed for that child cruelly slaughtered by a bomb don’t know how to distinguish between Jew and Muslim, between white or black, or Hindu or Sikh.

“This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible.”

People are dying all over the world. Are we in favor of violence or against it? That’s the question.

Comment by ted — August 8, 2006 #
Ultimately, however, it isn’t much of a question. It is easy to say that violence is bad, crime is bad, death is bad, suffering is bad. Those aren’t exactly risky or profound answers.

Man is not a rational animal; man is an animal capable of reason. It’s a significant distinction. Violence is natural, ineluctable. Denying violence is denying an element of human nature, a form of self-loathing at some level.

Comment by Bepah Benoweh — August 8, 2006 #
It we accept your premise, we are already dead. I cannot and will not accept that violence is inevitable. I cannot and will not accept the death of any child as “that’s just the way it is.” Absolutely not. It’s time for human beings to make a new choice. Are we willing to make a new choice with the violence inside us?

Comment by ted — August 8, 2006 #
I agree. Violence is wrong and it is not natural. Israel is wrongfully using it against defenseless innocents. It is not defense of anything to murder innocents. Saying it makes you feel bad is not enough. Saying it is “impossible” does not make it better. It does not justify slaughter. Israel should lay down its arms.

Comment by Kejii Fujowara — August 8, 2006 #
My premise is valid. You will never eliminate violence, not unless you seriously warp humans via bioengineering. It is part of human nature. You certainly don’t have to like its consequences, but it is a mistake to think what gives rise to violence in us will go away if people choose not to resort to it. As I said, nature is red in tooth and claw. It is not merciful. Sitting around and fretting about morality is the luxury of those who don’t have more immediate concerns, such as struggling to stay alive from day to day.

Comment by Bepah Benoweh — August 9, 2006 #
Kejii, I agree that Israel should lay down it’s arms. I also think Hezbollah should give up it’s violent campaign. There is no future with violence.

Bepah, I am not talking about morality. I am not talking about what is “right.” I don’t believe in either of those premises. I’m talking about what is practical, what gives life, what leads to a future for humanity. Violence surely does not lead to a future.

Comment by ted — August 9, 2006 #
If violence does not lead to a future, how did we get here? The story of human “progress” in history (for those who accept the notion of linear history) is replete with violence. Violence/force can give life and lead to a future, though it admittedly does not engender warm and fuzzy feelings in all participants in the process. I would agree that deliberate cruelty generally serves no purpose and is morally reprehensible. But cruelty and violence are not synonyms. In and of itself, violence is not an evil.

Israel is justified in the use of violence/force for the sake of its self-preservation.

Comment by Bepah Benoweh — August 10, 2006 #
At this stage in human history, if we continue on the path of violence, we will become extinct. Israel’s violence will not ensure it’s self-preservation; it will ensure it’s destruction. Hezbollah’s violence will similarly destroy it’s existance.

At this stage in human history, it is time for another course of action. What we’ve been doing up until now hasn’t worked.

Comment by ted — August 10, 2006 #
I don’t follow. When violence over the ages has led to massive increases in global popluation, how is it going to make us extinct? Is there an assumption that nuclear weapons will come into play and doom us all?

For more than forty years, a violent posture has preserved Israel. Why would that suddenly change? Robert Frost said that every age of man likes to imagine it is going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God. Is that the case here? How is the situation there any worse today than it was around the late 1960s, when the USSR was backing various Arab interests, placing us on the brink of some larger disaster?

Comment by Bepah Benoweh — August 11, 2006 #
[…] This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible. […] […]

Pingback by Humanize the Earth! » violence — August 27, 2006 #
Violence is not just the bombs raining down (made from scarce natural resources), but also the anger we hold inside, or use to lash out at others in our families, our neighborhoos, our worksplaces, etc. Even if we might temporarily benefit by the use of violence (someone gives us what we want, for example), it ultimately eats away at us from the inside. I want no part of it.

Comment by ted — August 27, 2006 #
Unfortunately, violence is not impossible. It is a disaster, terrible, horriffic but all too possible. I am wondering if saying that it is impossible denies its existance and prolongs the finding of a solution.

Comment by Linda Nowakowski — September 4, 2006 #
Linda, your message reminds me that “you do not criticize the peel when you like the fruit.”

Comment by ted — September 4, 2006 #

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