A New Year Marked by Irony
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 3, 2024
Apart from all the reasons that an exploding war in the Middle East creates global shivers, there is a terrible irony that Israel, a Jewish state, finds itself deploying simultaneous military reprisal attacks as the Jewish New Year arrives.
The decision by Iran to lob 180 missiles or more across Israel with no apparent targeting miraculously killed no one, though a Palestinian man died in falling debris. And there was an unrelated gun attack from another terror group on a light rail car that killed seven.
What It means is that we’re spending a holiday that is meant to be a solemn time for reconsideration for individuals, families and, one would think, nations worried instead about an expanding war.
For Israel, and for Jews who feel affiliation of any sort with Israel, whatever one might associate with spiritual introspection has been sacrificed to more mortal concerns about bombs and missiles. Even for those who feel no such affiliation, there is concern about security and military responses and about having lost any persuasive way to balance the very humanitarian concerns at the heart of the holiday with the flattened landscapes in Gaza, the West Bank, and now in southern Lebanon — and maybe an escalation to Yemen and Iran, the regional troublemakers.
The crossovers between the spiritual and the awfully real, between views that are anti-Zionist and anti-Jew, between perceptions of military deterrence and Palestinian starvation, are all too much upon us. Some of us have relatives whose lives are at risk, but there is nothing about either Judaism or Islam that requires caring about who owns real estate in the Middle East.
Jews are under literal attack, in Israel and abroad. That doesn’t obviate any concern about how Israel conducts war or illegally continues expansion of settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank or deny the security and dignity value of a separate state. Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and other neighbors are recognized separate states who seem to ignore the well-being of Palestinian residents, without Israeli occupation,
Confusions With Reprisals
The apparent and measurable rise in anti-Semitism worldwide has arrived even as Jews in the United States and Europe feel distinct separation from association with Israel’s right-wing leadership that eschews ceasefires and humanitarian ideals for an expansionist view of national security.
Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, terror groups all, and Iran as instigator are as aware of the calendar as they are of their temporal military campaigns. While Israel — and the United States as its backer — have taken the brunt of world criticism for expanding conflict rather than moving to end it, its foes continue to hold hostages, spent money freely on weapons rather than on addressing living conditions for Palestinians, or dropping demands to eliminate Israel — and Jews elsewhere in the world.
We know the pattern. Whether one set of missiles is a “reprisal” responding to the previous assassination, “precision” bombing that happens to destroy an apartment building or school masking military coordinators, elimination of tunnels hiding weapons by the hundreds or thousands, the response always triggers another cycle of killings.
The only thing that changes is when one side or the other sets the reprisal clock. Was it yesterday’s attack that requires an answer? Last week’s? Last Oct, 7? Eighty years ago? Three thousand years ago? Depending on who’s doing the counting, there always is a need for war-like response, consequences be damned.
There seems no end; there seems no plan; there seems no goal that results in living together.
Global Investment
Even with 40,000 U.S. servicemen in the war zone, Americans seem unwilling to recognize that the flames of the Middle East easily reach and affect nations and life afar. No one in the international community seems to be able to calm a Middle East where land-grabbing in the West Bank tops political solution-making, where guerilla attacks and apparently blindly aimed missiles are more important than diplomatic entreaties.
Lost in all this is the effect on civilians, on children, on now more than a year of war by whatever name. Lost is the effect on the families of hostages dead and still held.
Warring by Israel on the holiest of Muslim holidays would instantly be recognized as incendiary. Israel’s most right-wing politicians already regularly now provoke Muslim bruises with unnecessary security raids on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, an Islamic holy site.
We’re led by tradition to use these days to rethink who we are, and to reset a commitment to live by values that inevitably involve freedom from hunger as well as terror.
Maybe the holidays rather should prompt ceasefires, towards a required, quiet contemplation of what we are seeking to do with our lives.
##