I am not used to having my words fail me, but they did this time.
JVL Introduction
H/t Naomi Wayne at Jews for Justice for Palestinians who drew our attention to this post, saying that “Israeli Jewish stand-up comedian Daphna Baram, who is resident in London, has just come back from visiting her family in Israel. She wrote this on her Facebook page. She is happy for people to share by cutting and pasting. It is hard to imagine anything more touching, more generous, more honest, more perceptive, more full of profound understanding…”
In a previous incarnation Baram authored the important study Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel, 2004. (It is sorely in need of an update to cover the Guardian’s vicissitudes over the past two decades).
Baram: “What we couldn’t imagine, but always knew: that if you keep two million people in the largest concentration camp on earth and bomb thousands of them to death on occasion, you create a volcano that is bound to erupt in your face one day, causing horrid atrocities in its wake…”
This article was originally published by Daphna Baram's Facebook page on Mon 9 Oct 2023. Read the original here.
I am not used to having my words fail me, but they did this time.
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Articles and personal stories like this one help me hold on to a disappearing sense of shared humanity, at a time when it’s becoming horribly easy to hate.
Nobody with any human decency hates the powerless and suffering – but it is all too easy to regard as entirely “other” and unforgivable those with more influence who might have stopped the horrors from happening at all, had they chosen to act differently.
On the (thankfully few) occasions when I really loathe somebody, visualising them as they were when only hours-old babies – thrillingly new, with limitless possibilities and so vulnerable – helps me overcome my unwillingness to “see” them properly. I pass on this idea in case it helps anyone else facing similar struggles.
What Daphna writes is both inspiring and moving but it reflects the tragedy that Israel will not of course learn any lessons from the Palestinian offensive other than to kill and bomb and destroy even more than they have done.
Unfortunately what Daphna writes will not find an echo amongst more than a handful in Israel itself.
This is the tragedy that Zionism has inflicted on Palestine and of course western leaders are with them all the way, including clamping down on free speech in this country, all in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’.
Thank you Daphne for another proof that Zionism is NOT Judaism
And
Judaism is NOT Zionism.
I hope the message of peace and tolerance indicated by Naomi Wayne will prevail in this hour of hostility and intolerance.
I wish people did not have labels. We are all people!
The warmongers are to blame. The peacemakers pay the price. I grieve for the lost people, the terror, the pain. The lost boys of Hamas. The conflicted boys and girls of the IDF.
Thank you for this. Finally a well-balanced fair Jewish perspective on events that does not shy away from the uncomfortable and awful realities of Israel and cruel treatment of Palestinians. A honest look at cause and effect!