The Gaza Context War

What a ruined phone call taught me about Israel, journalism, dead children, antisemitism, and the moral violence of leaving things out.

Who Wouldn’t Want to Talk With Me?

After it got heated and we hung up, I started writing the apology note immediately. Short, sweet, no drama. Take the high road, Stella. But as usual, the high road turned into the scenic route.

The Apology Note

What’s happening with the Jews and Israel is appalling, and it’s hard to accept that someone I love and respect is going to make the same simplistic non-arguments I hear online.

You don’t have to agree with me, but if you make a major moral claim about the world, especially about damning a person or a people, I don’t know how to just sit there honorably without asking what you mean.

It sounds like to some degree you think the current animosity toward Jews and Israel is justified, and since you’re smart and I respect your mind, I take that seriously.

Innocent civilians died on both sides and that’s horrible obviously, including children.

But where exactly is this animosity coming from? Is it really just this war? Or is older baggage attaching itself to it?

I also can’t pretend Jews don’t carry a historical paranoia about this stuff. The speed with which hatred coheres around us always raises an ancient question in the back of the mind: how much of this is really about the current war?

“Civilians died” isn’t enough information. And when that alone seems sufficient to morally damn an entire country, or even a people, I start wondering what else is attached to the reaction. Sometimes it feels as though people were already waiting for a reason.

Basically, in one conversation, I heard you say something like: Jews were somehow implicated in Trump’s impulsive war, and Israel was morally damned because civilians died, with very little patience for context.

I started getting all Socratic on you, and I can see how that’d be irritating.

It started with me being curious, because I think your ideas are usually pretty good. But when I asked questions, you seemed to get mad at me, sarcastic and dismissive.

But after ten years of being friends, it’s like, that blunt honesty is something I love. It’s part of why we’re even friends. I definitely can’t talk this way with just anyone.

But when you made it a hundred percent about me, and said this is why people sometimes don’t like talking with me, it felt ad hominem. Like okay, it takes two to tango.

After a certain point, talking to people starts feeling alienating if they get rude, evasive, sarcastic, and then suddenly act like your curiosity is the problem.

I called you back because I still care about you. I remember you as someone who’s a little dark at times, and very funny, but behind it all solid and clearheaded. Over the years I’ve learned that your thoughts matter, and I’d be a fool to ignore them.

I want your thoughts. I’m not trying to replace them with mine. I’m trying to understand what they are.

I can totally be friends with someone who is anti-Israel. But if someone says something that sounds antisemitic to me, I’m going to ask follow-up questions, because that’s kind of important to unpack.

I’m not built to just sit there and feel bad about things you’re saying without telling you.

Anyway. This is where the note stopped being a note.

Without Context

Talking about killing without context is a betrayal. It’s stupid and mean.

Dead civilians is horrible but there’s all kinds of context. Leaving out context is sort of an indicator to me that hate is spreading faster than it can be rationally justified.

Civilians dying isn’t a reason to hate a people. It’s a reason to hate war.

Would you say that alone justifies hate toward the US?

There are a million ways to frame the same dead bodies.

Were they targeted?

Were combatants hiding among civilians?

Were they wearing civilian clothes?

Were they even all civilians?

How many Hamas fighters have been logged as civilian children?

Does it even matter, or are most people just going to assume the worst because they can get away with doing so?

It’s still horrible either way.

The All-Children-Fucking-Matter Problem

Let’s say someone lifts up their own little kid, and from behind that innocent little kid, starts shooting at another child with the intention to kill.

And let’s say you know for a fact that if you don’t intervene, that child is going to be murdered in the next few seconds.

And let’s say the only possible option the shooter has given you is to shoot back while risking hurting the child they’re hiding behind.

The child is innocent. Both children are.

So tell me. What’s the moral math there?

What can you do? There’s only one option. Neutralize the shooter and pray you don’t hit the child.

You do your level best not to hit the child while the shooter does their level best to make sure you do.

That’s the nightmare. Not because the answer is unclear, but because it isn’t.

Now imagine watching that happen from far away, through a shaky phone video, with no context, no timeline, no idea who started what.

Imagine someone showing you only the final frame.

“This man shot a child.”

Technically true.

Also maybe one of the most dishonest possible ways to describe what happened.

The Israeli claim, broadly speaking, is that this is the kind of dilemma they believe they are trapped in repeatedly.

Hamas puts military infra inside civilian life.

Hamas has said and shown it will attack Israeli civilians again if given the chance. And Hamas is not alone. Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, and militants in the West Bank are all part of the pressure around a country smaller than New Jersey.

After October 7th, Israel decided that waiting passively maybe feels like Russian roulette based on what they know.

The world can have opinions. Israel has to literally live with the outcome.

Before the wall, Israel endured around 150 suicide bombings. Restaurants. Buses. Civilian places. Imagine three or four of those in your city, then imagine 150.

A toddler’s dismembered foot. The laces still tied.

After the wall was up suicide bombings plummeted. Nobody’s saying it was ideal, but there are sane, contextual reasons for it. And for the blockade. With good behavior anything’s possible; the future is what you make it.

More than a billion dollars in aid and infrastructure were rerouted into tunnels, weapons, and martyrdom machinery after Israel left Gaza.

Israel was eager to coexist peacefully, with no imperial appetite, no interest in conquest, no desire to spread outward or impose itself on the region.

People project that onto Israel, but that’s not Israel’s jam. (Imperial adventurism is what Islamist despots do.)

Consider the two million Arab Muslims living in Israel proper right now. Arab members of Knesset have literally sent Israeli officials to prison. Israel is a modern democracy with real courts, real political opposition, freedom of speech, and protections that barely exist anywhere else in the region.

The Jewish homeland was established under international law, with global support.

No sooner did Israel form than it was attacked by five nations at once.

Many Arabs fled expecting the Jews to lose. The Jews didn’t lose.

And the bitterness never really stopped.

Hamas and its supporters want it all. Not coexistence. Victory. The Jews gone, the land theirs.

As a side note, Netanyahu has had to pander to religious coalitions, including settlers who invoke religion and ancient history to justify building in disputed areas. I hate that they do that. It damages Israel’s moral credibility for no good reason.

Like every democracy, Israel has coalition politics, and coalition politics can produce ugly concessions.

Does any of this excuse Hamas? Of course not. Does it explain the world’s lightning-fast disgust and double standards? Not to me.

Oy Vey, What To Do

We’re a chosen people, chosen by fate, not for glory but for ridiculous constant pressure. Again and again, history hands us mind-bending dilemmas no decent person should ever have to solve: defend some children, spare others, and be hated by all sides either way.

As a great Jew once said: forgive them, they know not what they do.

All we can do is our best, to meet our moral obligations, to try to defend from demise, to spare from harm, and to meet our responsibilities as Jews human beings.

Note to Self: Don’t Post

I’m not posting this.

I know myself. I know what happens when I get going. The note becomes an argument, the argument becomes a Stellaloquy, which becomes a flare shot into the internet, and then I’m standing there in the dust wondering who wouldn’t want to talk with me.

So no. This one stays unpublished.

I already lost a friend today.

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