Yesterday I came across a video on a widely-followed Instagram page.
It was a small section of a full Joe Rogan interview with author Coleman Hughes.
In the clip, Hughes was accurately explaining to Rogan, the Hamas tactic of fully embedding itself within civilian communities, thereby making it nearly impossible for the IDF to distinguish between members of the terrorist group and innocent Gazans.
Hughes went on to cite the estimates on tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths
as an acceptable “ratio” in that kind of war, offering that given the large number
of Hamas terrorists, that these casualties were somehow reasonable or normal.
I commented on the IG post that the clip felt problematic to me, saying:
This video still doesn’t address the wide-scale deaths of the Palestinian people
and perpetuates the myth that there is no other possible course of action or
strategy that can be taken. This video seems to cheapen the value of Palestinian lives by deeming it an “acceptable ratio.” When we get there with any group of people we’re in a dangerous place. Dehumanization is sometimes subtle and
this feels like it’s approaching that.
The responses were fierce and immediate, with an assertion by the page author
that I must be “pro-Hamas” and others accusing me of not valuing the people brutally murdered on October 7th, of being antisemitic.
This wasn’t unfamiliar, as these knee-jerk, all-or-nothing responses are now commonplace in threads and conversations about the horrors in and around Israel, when empathetic human beings come trying to hold the weight of the wide-scale suffering and to understand an incredibly complex situation that has been here long before most of us were born.
The incendiary accusations fly so easily off the fingertips:
You’re pro-Hamas!
You support the October 7th terrorists!
You’re antisemitic!
You don’t care about Israelis!
or
You support genocide!
You’re pro-Zionism!
You’re Islamophobic!
You don’t care about Gazans!
These polarizing assertions help us understand how we’re still so far from progress
in traversing this emotional minefield.
I’m wondering how compassionate people with genuine questions and unresolved internal conflicts on the bloodshed and loss of life we’re seeing can engage in productive dialogue without being instantly made into a lazy caricature, dismissed as fully partisan or accused of intellectual ignorance.
If the responses to any questions to any pieces of content or any stated position
are immediately met with accusations of being *insert incendiary label here*, how exactly are we all (no matter where we line up) supposed to navigate something
this difficult to wrap our heads and hearts around, something that people have
been wrestling with for decades?
It seems that to some, this is simply a black-and-white zero-sum game with a completely good and completely evil side, and with an endless supply of well-spoken justifications and supporting opinion pieces to support their position. There isn’t an easy way for people who grieve life wherever it is destroyed to participate in necessary conversations about a path forward.
In matters of such consequence and complexity, it’s sad that we so easily ascribe motive to people instead of simply engaging with them, listening to them, hearing them, attempting to understand them, seeking the best in them.
Many people are trying to make sense of senseless death and if we’re being honest with each other very few of us truly have the answers, whether we are world leaders, passionate activists, heartbroken clergy, or simply decent people burdened by the suffering of others. We all have our anger, our pain, our despair, and the hope that this is all simple—but it simply isn’t.
Can we absolutely decry and denounce the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel,
while still suggesting Netanyahu’s response is beyond proportionate?
Can we despise what we see as the exploitation and disregard by Hamas and
the IDF of innocent civilians?
Can we be passionately against the vilification and blind hatred of Muslims and
of Jews here and around the world?
When any group of people are being assessed as acceptable collateral damage
or justifiable losses or the cost of stopping terrorism, that isn’t something that
we should simply accept without at least questioning it as an idea.
Isn’t that dehumanization at the very heart of the these disasters to begin with?
At some point, when are we merely repeating the pathology of the past?
When we imagine that righteousness is anywhere but with innocent lives, how are we offering anything redemptive to the moral arc of the universe?
Millions of Americans of every religious and political affiliation, and of every nation
of origin and ethnic background are fully grieving this hatred and bigotry and
death in and around Israel, as well as the discrimination and hate crimes here at home that echo them. We’re all genuinely trying to find a way to properly value innocent human life somewhere without disregarding it elsewhere.
That doesn’t mean we have the answers and it doesn’t mean we align neatly with
a clearly defined side, other than the side of innocent life. It simply means we’re asking what feels like hard and honest questions about something that the human heart finds impossible to hold.
Is this possible?
If it isn’t, hundreds of years from now, people will still be here asking the same questions, trafficking in the same bigotry, grieving senseless killing, and making the same lazy and dangerous assertions about strangers.
That would be a tragedy.
