Conversation

A friend sent me this:

Double loyalty


We, the left, are often accused of double loyalty. And on days like this I really feel it. Neither loyal nor duplicitous are the right words here, and I'll explain, but the sentiment is right.
In the Mahane Yehuda market this morning, a street musician sang "Am Yisrael Chai" (“With the People of Israel”) on a manorial scale. The market itself was empty, and a woman was talking to her friend about her regular vegetable seller who was not allowed to open today. All stalls owned by Arabs are closed. In the street around her, families get out of two vehicles. The majority are already crying, the rest hold a sadness that is hard to explain, and hesitantly knock on the door of one of the houses. Family of a dead? of a kidnapped?
You open a video of a cleaning worker who was beaten in the city center because he is Arab. "Double loyalty" is seeing both this and that with tears in your eyes. It's a moment to talk to friends who don't know their family members are dead or kidnapped and why to hope, and to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. And a moment later talking to a friend from Gaza who all he has to say is that every night now is the scariest night of his life. He calculates his chances, and his children’s, of getting up tomorrow morning.
"Double loyalty" is letting the heart break both from one and the other. It is to hold this moment between the heartbreak and the pain and the shock over the erasure of Nir Oz, and thinking about all the people there, and the anxiety over the attack on Shajaya, and thinking about all the people there (two kibbuzim that were attacked and). It's feeling the urge to both donate blood and arrange food baskets for the south, and also to be in Susia when settlers shoot any shepherd who dares to leave the village. Loyalty may not be the right word. It's double pain, double heartbreak, care, love. It is to hold everyone's humanity. And it's hard. It's so hard to have humanity here. It's exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world is just asking you to let go. It's so much easier to "choose a side" - it almost doesn't matter which side. Just choose, and stick to it, and at least reduce the amount of pain you hold. And at least feel part of a group and less alone in all this. As if that's really an option. As if we don't understand that our pains are intertwined. That there is no solution only to the pain of Ofakim (an Israeli city in the south, overrun by Hamas) without a solution to the pain of Khan Yunis (a city in Gaza). And we know it, and recite it, and hurt it over and over again.
I tried to understand what I was actually writing, and especially why. What's the point, except to get a little out of this feeling of having two worlds that look so contradictory from the outside and feel so much the same from the inside. I think the closest I've come to an answer to why I'm writing is because somehow, in a heartbreaking and soul-crushing way, it also feels like the only optimism I can hold right now. Optimism based on the fact that it exists.
And this pain, that some of us in our small community hold, this "double loyalty", is probably the hope of this place.

#Israel #Gaza #FreePalestine #WeStandWithIsrael #FreeGaza #Palestine #Hamas