I discovered this post by a young Jewish woman about her reaction to the conflict in the Middle East. This was the post that helped me formulate my own views because I resonated with hers.
Rose Win is a blogger and digital nomad. She recently settled in Boulder, Colorado after two years of writing and traveling solo around the country. She grew up in Seattle and lived in Israel as a child and young adult. She shares here her reflections on the state of the war in Gaza.
She writes:
I wrote in my last post that I have been plagued by writer’s block. That is true, to an extent. There have been a lot of stories in the past couple of months I’ve wanted to write about. My parents came for Thanksgiving. Karina visited. I went back to San Marcos to see Kasey and Evie. I joined a rock climbing gym. I got deathly ill. One subject, however, has stood in my way like a giant, impenetrable barrier. War.
I can’t get past it. Everything else seems ridiculous, and trivial, and out of touch in comparison.
Specifically, I’m talking about the war in Gaza. I don’t know how many drafts I’ve written trying to cohere my thoughts, distill my feelings. My head swims and my heart aches, but I can’t find ethical, or intellectual, or emotional clarity. I keep getting stuck in a labyrinth of contradiction, locked between layers of devastation. So this post is a mishmash, a dumping, a meandering reflection of the competing and overlapping circles in my head.
The foundational layer of devastation, as I wrote before, is the sadistic slaughter of Jewish lives. The maiming, the raping, the abducting, the wholesale massacring. From there emerge the layers wrought by the world’s response. The mindboggling, Orwellian universe where murder becomes a “justified act of resistance,” where killers are “victims of oppression,” and rapists are “freedom fighters.” Or maybe they’re not rapists at all, because for some reason, violence against Jewish women isn’t believable. For some reason, Jewish women need to make their own pathetic hashtag to be heard: #MeTooUnlessYoureAJew.
There’s a new layer of consciousness: the sickening realization that the antisemitism of the 20th century never went away. It just lay dormant, hidden under the surface – waiting for the right opportunity to shapeshift and rear its ugly head. “The Jews are parasites living on other people’s lands. They deserve to die,” said the antisemites of the 20th century. “The Jews are occupiers of other people’s lands. They deserve to die,” say the antisemites of the 21st century.
There’s the hubris of the left which, using the lens of intersectionality, casts the war in racialized terms, white people oppressing brown people. Never mind that more than half of Israel’s Jews are “brown,” hailing from Arab counties that expelled, or, “ethnically cleansed” their Jewish populations in the late 1940s and 1950s following Israel’s creation.
Today’s liberal college campuses preach “language is violence.” Students police speech to minimize “harm.” Except speech against Jews. Because for some reason saying “genocide to Jews” is not violent, or hateful, or harmful. For some reason, chanting genocide to Jews is okay “depending on the context.”
I watch people condemn Israel for committing genocide against Palestinians. I’d like to know why Hamas’ charter, which, in no uncertain terms calls for the annihilation of the Jews and the establishment of an Islamist state in Israel, is not also condemned as genocidal? Why are the Palestinians seen as the rightful, indigenous inhabitants of the land when the Jews, whose presence predates the Palestinians, are not? Why is it that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jews were the world’s refugees, but following the creation of the state of Israel, they are the world’s most reviled colonizers? Why is a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority deemed racist, but a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority deemed righteous?
The questions seem simple. The answers are anything but. I want to defend Israel. I want to rage at the hypocrisy and blatant double standards. But I’m stopped. I can’t. Because look at Gaza. Neighborhoods razed to the ground. Wholesale cities decimated. Thousands and upon thousands of women and children dead. Eighty percent of the population displaced – facing polluted water, starvation, overcrowding, flooding, freezing, and rampant disease.
Israel told over a million people in northern Gaza to flee to the south. Then they bombed the south. “Gaza becomes a graveyard for children” reads one headline. “Nowhere is safe” says the next. Here’s another: “We have the right to live.”
I want to demand “ceasefire now!” because this level of humanitarian catastrophe is so breathtakingly horrific it’s hard to even fathom. Because this level of collective punishment cannot be justified. Because this destruction, this sheer loss of civilian life, cannot go on.
I want to demand “ceasefire now” because I despise Benjamin Netanyahu and the thugs and zealots that rule his repulsive right-wing government. Netanyahu is cut from the same cloth as Putin. He knows Israel holds him responsible for the attacks on Oct 7. The end of the war spells his demise. So, the war will wage on. Because narcissistic demagogues never willingly cede power.
I want to demand “ceasefire now.” But I haven’t.
Does a ceasefire mean Hamas will remilitarize – rearm and resume its genocidal charter to wipe out the Jews? Does a ceasefire leave Hamas’ sprawling tunnel system – built underneath hospitals, grocery stores, schools, universities, private homes, and graveyards – intact so they can infiltrate Israel and terrorize its citizens again? Does a ceasefire condemn the remaining 115 Israeli hostages to death? Does a ceasefire send a message to other Arab countries, waiting in the wings, that Israel is weak, and the Jewish state can be destroyed?
Are any of these questions justifiable? I don’t know. I don’t know.
When the world accuses Israel of being an apartheid state, I want to push back. Apartheid refers to the brutal system of institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa. Israel, albeit flawed, is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, muti-cultural democratic state, where a fifth of the population isn’t Jewish yet has the same civil and legal rights as every other citizen.
But. That only rings true for those living within Israel’s green line – the 1949 armistice border. Following the war of 1967, Israel gained the Golan Heights from Syria, Gaza from Egypt, and the West Bank from Jordan. With the exception of Gaza, where Israel pulled out in 2005, those territories have been occupied ever since (though Israel, along with Egypt, maintained control over Gaza’s borders).
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law. It never annexed the West Bank, because giving Palestinians Israeli citizenship would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. So one Israeli government after the next left Palestinians in stateless limbo, while sanctioning illegal Jewish settlement construction that zig-zagged through contiguous territory and punctured holes through the dream of Palestinian statehood. All the while Israel offered Jewish settlers – often messianic, often self-righteous, often violent – full rights of Israeli citizenship and subjected Palestinians to military rule.
So, yes, Israel can claim it’s the only pluralistic democracy in the Middle East. But also, no, it cannot.
In his book documenting bereaved families of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, author Colum McCann talked about his decision to title his book Apeirogon:
“Apeirogon is a weird word, I know. An apeirogon can’t really be drawn, it can only be suggested… But I loved it from the moment I heard about it. The idea that it had an infinite number of sides was attractive to me because I knew it wasn’t a two-sided situation, that it wasn’t balanced.”
This is how I feel when I write and think about Israel. Sides upon sides upon sides upon sides. Overlapping truths. Overlapping contradictions. Questions without answers. Problems without solutions.
There’s a reason why I’ve written draft after draft after draft. Everywhere I turn I’m stuck. I want to take a stand, but every stand I take conflicts with another. That’s why I haven’t written. That’s why I must write.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for expressing the conundrum so well
This author claims to be disconnected with her thought process, but it seems clear to me: peace is a product of long term justice. Revenge may be sweet, but it never ends.
This time of year, Christians celebrate the arrival of their Trinitarian God, who showed them how to live and grant others justice. The followers have mostly failed in the last two millennia to live that way. They follow Other world religions toward this failure, and join irreligious philosophy which has, in its turn, failed in this most noble of endeavors.
But we have to try, don’t we?
On this shortest day of the year, may all who read here stare out of our collective darkness into a spring that comes as sure as anything we know. Great love to all.
Thank you, Roy. You have a great soul.
Wow! What a impassioned unraveling of the complexities of Israel and the Middle East from the perspective of a young, thoughtful Jewish woman! Keep writing, Rose Win, and help others understand the many layers and nuances of the conflict that flood your mind and haunt your soul.
I have been disappointed and angered at most of what I’ve read in the traditional western media about this latest war in Gaza, that should be called propoganda supporting Hamas.
I’m thinking this way because most of what I read is blaming Israel for the suffering and deaths of palestinians. Seldom if ever is there any mention of who started this slaughter, Hamas, who is using the deaths of Palestinians for propoganda purposes, Hamas, who dug their tunnels under hospitals and schools, Hamas, and then fought from nearby or from inside those hospitals and schools to draw fire from the IDF, during battles. Hamas.
Recently, as soon as the last cease fire and hostage exchange ended, I read about one Hamas missile battery, those boxy structures on the flatbed of a truck that can be easily moved.
I read that Hamas missile battery fired from inside a Palestinian refugee camp in south Gaza, drawing return fire from IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) who have the technology to determine almost instantly the moment the missiles were fired, where they came from.
Still, the Hamas terrorists that manned that missile battery probably had time to escape the IDF return fire. Those brutal murderers may have also driven off in that truck so they could fill the battery with more missiles and drive to another location near a concentration of Palestinian refugees.
I looked in the western media for reports of that incident, and what I read all used the word “alleged” when mentioning that Hamas missile battery being located inside a South Gaza Palestinian refugee camp, but did not use the world “alleged” when mentioning the IDF’s return fire.
It’s easy to slip bias into a news report without lying. In this case the bias is glaringly obvious. Hamas did no wrong. Israel is guilty.
When the IDF invited reporters into the ruins of schools and hospitals to show them the entrances to tunnels that had been discovered, Tunnels that led deep underground the language in the news reports was biased, casting doubt that Hamas would do something like that. Making it sound that the IDF was lying.
The only recently discovered tunnel that led sixty feet deep to the main tunnel that was big enough to drive a car or truck through, that didn’t have the biased language in those news reports, casting doubt, was the tunnel entrance found outside of the Gaza city near the Gaza border with Israel, a large tunnel leading under the border into Israel. The reporter in that news report was from the AP. Outside the entrance at ground level, no sign of houses or buildings anywhere close to it. Still that tunnel led back toward Gaza city.
“There’s a new layer of consciousness: the sickening realization that the antisemitism of the 20th century never went away.”
The people swept up by antisemitism recently are not the first. There have been many others. (Paraphrasing a Yiddish song sung by Jewish refugees in Kazakhstan circa WWII called “Purim Gifts for Hitler.” I think. I got that from a website, so maybe not true.)
By the way, Diane, speaking of tech companies and users being untrustworthy and dangerous, WordPress keeps making it more and more difficult to keep my data private and still post comments. They’re starting to use more authentication methods. I already recently started creating a new account every day. This time, I had play games with Google to set it up. Not sure if one day too soon, I might not be able to find a back door to log in. There’s a limit to how many data I’m willing to surrender, after all. Almost didn’t get in today. Made me think. Just wanted to let you know what’s going on in case something happens.
I see what the WordPress problem was now. To (hopefully) keep Google or Apple from gathering personally identifiable information in my comments, I just have to write them only on my laptop from now on, not my tablet or my phone.
I deeply lament what is occurring in Gaza. It is tragic. And while Netanyahu must be voted out of government and tried for his crimes (not alleged either), Israel must continue this fight against evil. Your point that Hamas will throw as many lives in front of bombs, missiles, bullets, etc. is sad but absolutely accurate. They have zero regard for human life, not that of Jews certainly, but not that of their own people. Israel, on the other hand, values life, and not only of their people. Yes, they make mistakes, and war is cruel, but until Hamas lays down its weapons, returns the hostages, and surrenders its jihadist soldiers, this war will continue in one shape or another. It must because as the writer points out, Hamas cannot return to perpetrate this evil again.