Let's fight the fire, not each other
The Tragic Optimist is about holding contradictions.
In the aftermath of October 7th, the contradictions were brutal and hard to hold.
I was reeling. Everyone was. It was only a few weeks after Oct 7, but as best I could, I tried to put my thoughts and feelings into a newsletter to you all. I was quite anxious before I hit send. “It’s ‘just’ an email,” I told a friend. But I spent hours on it, digging deep, trying to find the right tone/voice, honor all the aspects deserving honor, share links that would be useful, all to a diverse list not expecting an email of this kind… I crossed my fingers that most folks would receive it well, and it would be of service.
One reader said, “Thank you. This is everything.”
Another, a beloved family member, was extremely hurt, felt I was being insensitive and one-sided. We talked it through.
Another noted the dangers: “There's so much to say, and so many ways people will take whatever you say differently than how you meant it.”
Another suggested I share with readers this short video of Gabor Mate explaining how he sees the Palestine Israël conflict, and so I am.
Another made the very good point that, “Oppression should not be an apology for savagery.”
Another suggested that peace requires giving things up, including, possibly, our own righteousness about who is right and who is wrong.
Another said she had been “longing to read things that give space for the multiple truths of this moment.”
Another reader, a Middle East peace activist, had probably the response that touched me the deepest. She described the “narrow space” people like her were sitting in, with traumatized, binary-thinking folks acting out all around her. She told me, “every time I see someone I love showing that despite the pain and grief we must do everything we can to stop the insanity… my hope in humanity is restored a little bit.”
And now here we are, 3 months later, and the “much worse” feared in the newsletter has happened: 25,000 Palestinian dead, 130 Israeli hostages still held, 2 million Palestinians displaced, with no end in sight. It *is* insane. The light in this devastating darkness: the many, many people doing all they can to stop it. Join them if you’d like. One day it will stop.
Let’s strive for a world with neither victim nor perpetrator (and in the meantime, let’s recognize — painfully, heartbreakingly — that anyone, any People, can be both at once).
October 24, 2023
Dear Friend—
There is so much that is heartbreaking, infuriating, depressing, about the latest gruesome turning of the knife in the ever more tangled story of Palestine/Israel. It feels like it could suck all the hope out of the world, if we let it.
The Middle East is on fire. You, readers, know that the planet is, too. Thousands of innocents – so many of them children – have been murdered. Millions of loved ones are in mourning. And it is about to get worse, possibly much worse. For Israel/Palestine, and for our beloved, one-and-only planet.
So, what do we do?
Well, I’m no geopolitical expert on the Middle East, but one lesson I learned from writing Better Catastrophe, and trying to grapple with the many intractable contradictions in the climate emergency, also applies here: We can do more than one thing at the same time, including things that might feel like opposites. Which is exactly why, in her Generation Dread newsletter this week, climate psychologist Britt Wray suggested that our climate work can actually help us hold the news out of the Middle East.
It’s the same heart muscle.
Because:
We can mourn AND organize.
We can grieve the loss of innocent Israeli life AND still condemn the Occupation.
We can acknowledge that people are suffering in both Gaza City and in Tel Aviv while ALSO acknowledging that Israel is vastly more powerful and is using that power to systematically oppress the Palestinian people.
We can demand a ceasefire WITHOUT knowing what comes next.
We can oppose the Occupation AND antisemitism; similarly, we can oppose Hamas AND Islamophobia
We can be against the Occupation WITHOUT being for Hamas. In fact, we can redefine the idea of “sides” altogether, and instead choose to ”side with the child over the gun”, as Naomi Klein counsels us.
I was in New York when the towers fell, and as we said in countless posters, vigils, protests in the weeks after 9/11:
“Our grief is not a cry for war”.
Those crying for war right now, those choosing hard sides, pushing simple fixes, screaming for revenge, letting their ideology overcome their humanity, are not to be followed here. Instead, I am following folks who are struggling through it all, holding these contradictions, balancing their competing loyalties, and finding their way. One stand-out here is journalist Peter Beinart. His probing honesty has helped me these last weeks, and might help you as well:
Here he is being interviewed in Slate, somehow heartbroken and conflicted and grounded and wise all at the same time. Here’s his op-ed in the NYT, “There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.”, and here’s a 3-way interview in the Guardian, ‘What’s our common language?’ Jewish and Palestinian thinkers on where the left goes from here, between Peter and two longtime human rights activists (one Jewish, one Palestinian) as they all try to stumble their way through to some least-worst, better-catastrophe-esque possibilities for the region.
With Palestine, as with climate, the final complexity we must navigate is possibly also the most important:
We must act WITHOUT yet having all the answers.
I hope some of the perspectives, thoughts, links, and resources I’ve shared in this email are helpful to you.
The world is on fire, people. Let’s fight the fire, not each other.
Sincerely,
Andrew Boyd