Note: I drafted this piece mostly during the second week of November 2023, about a month into the Israel-Hamas war. This piece is simply an encapsulation of my thoughts and feelings about the violence that I saw unfolding—still see unfolding—before me. It cites some sources, but I would not in any way call it researched. I am sure it contains both historical inaccuracies and missing nuances. But none of that obscures the larger, very simple point: no human endeavor can justify the enforced imprisonment, starvation, and collective punishment of innocent people that has for too many centuries been used as a strategy of war.
A few weeks ago, I attended a talk with Andrew I. Port on his new book Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust. His book focuses on German responses to genocide crises in the latter half of the 20th century—specifically in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—and how Germans were often the first to aid refugees and, in the case of Bosnia, actually intervene militarily to derail the conflict. Port made a compelling case that 1960s German national political discourse—across both left and right—established Nazism as a horrendous evil never to be reproduced. That, in addition to many Germans’ own post-war experiences with poverty and famine, moved Germans to respond to genocide crises with more swiftness than most other Western nations.
After the talk, I remarked to Port about how this compares with the descendants of Germans who committed genocide in early 20th century Namibia—a genocide that historians now see as an early blueprint for the Holocaust. I had recently watched the 2002 documentary 100 Years of Silence about the genocide and its aftermath, in which it was noted that there was still a strong culture of pride among these descendants, that they seemed to believe in their ancestors as valorous victims rather than genocidal colonizers. (The barest look into the historical facts will prove that the opposite was in fact true. It is also worth noting that, despite the fact that Namibia is still a place stricken by racial inequality, there have been land grants and other reparations in recognition of the genocide.) Was the difference between post-Holocaust Germans and German-Namibians, I wondered, the physical and political distance from the groups of people who have been harmed? Germans in Europe were prepared to help Cambodians or Rwandans, people living in far away places, but most German-Namibians seemed unable to look at their own starkly unequal society, with its obvious legacy of genocide, and admit the truth of what had happened.
I also drew a connection to the United States and said that it’s easy to forget how many white Americans, even anti-slavery white Americans, were in favor of sending all Black people “back” to Africa after the Civil War. Alongside that sentiment, I think about Frank L. Baum’s notion that “Having wronged [American Indians] for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” (source) For white Americans in the nineteenth century, the prospect of living amongst people they had formerly enslaved or genocided seemed to be too painful and frightening. And that, like the German-Namibians, white Americans of later generations have generally avoided fully acknowledging the suffering caused by slavery and genocide/ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. We won’t talk about it in public, we avoid teaching our children about it, and we certainly don’t want to admit to the necessity of making reparations.
When I was speaking to Andrew Port, it did not occur to me to draw a connection to Israel as well. But now it makes sense to me that Germany and other European nations had a strong interest in creating a place outside of Europe for Jews after the Holocaust, since what had just happened to Jews was overwhelmingly painful to acknowledge. By making reparations for Jews without ever having to live amongst them again, it seemed like the perfect solution had been hit upon—except for the fact that the people of Palestine would need to be displaced from their ancestral homeland in order to make this solution a reality.
It is hard to look into the face of a people we know we have wronged, to still encounter them every day and have to treat them as humans. It is easier to create a different place for them, either through death, apartheid, or distance, so we do not have to face down the shame, guilt, and self-hatred that comes from knowing we have done wrong. Germans in Europe could take genuine humanitarian interest in Cambodians or Rwandans because they did not bear the knowledge of having personally harmed them. Once the Jews had been sent away from Europe through the creation of Israel, Germans were free to expiate their feelings of genocidal guilt through helping victims of genocide elsewhere.
I’m not saying this because it is written down in historical record. I’m saying it because it feels true to me as a person whose ancestors participated in or benefitted from the genocide and oppression of multiple groups of people, and who still benefits from that. The discomfort can transmute, if we are not careful, into disgust, hatred, and a desire to kill those who remind us of what we’ve done wrong. The power of shame in this capacity is not to be underestimated. The United States has barely begun reckoning with the damage that this shame has done and continues to do. We generally call it white supremacy and its milder manifestations white fragility (although I think Rebecca Slue’s coinage “white volatility” is more accurate.) From my perspective, the apparatus of white supremacy going back 500 years is less an ideology of domination and more a cognitive and emotional strategy to absolve feelings of guilt about the past.
*A few days before Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th, I had coincidentally been reading about the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. Around the turn of the millennium, the Romans colonized Judea and life as second-class citizens under Rome was a grind of poverty and discrimination for Jews. Various rebellions took place in Judea starting in the first 20 or 30 years after colonization, which culminated in a mass uprising in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The armies of the future Roman emperor Titus Caesar Vespasianus brutally put down that rebellion: after a siege that lasted for weeks, the Romans killed, enslaved, or exiled every inhabitant of Jerusalem. They chose two or three of the grandest buildings to save, so that anyone might know what a great city Rome had conquered, and then completely and systematically razed the rest of Jerusalem to the ground. There continued to be scattered rebellions in Judea over the next few years that were also put down, but the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple was the decisive point.
When the Romans began their siege of Jerusalem, all food was stopped from coming into the city. The Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus describes the famine, noting that people began going mad due to hunger, looting the bodies of those who had starved to death looking for food, eating their own leather shoes and bridles. None of this in itself was remarkable, Josephus noted, except that it led to a singular incident that solidified Titus’s decision to raze the city entirely.
A formerly wealthy woman, called Mary in the eighteenth century translation I found, was trapped in Jerusalem during the siege and being threatened daily by Jewish soldiers who believed that she was hiding stores of food. Mary had a young son and one day the delirium of famine overtook her. Since, she reasoned, if she and her son lived, they would become Roman slaves anyway, it was better to teach a lesson to the soldiers who were hounding her. She killed her son, cooked and ate part of him, and left the rest for the soldiers. When the soldiers came, they smelled roasted meat and threatened to kill her for withholding food until they saw what she had done and left in horror. News of this incident spread amongst the city and to the Romans. When Titus heard of it, he found justification for completely leveling Jerusalem:
This sad instance was quickly told to the Romans, some of whom could not believe it: and others pitied the distress which the Jews were under. But there were many of them who were hereby induced to a more bitter hatred than ordinary against our [the Jewish] nation. But for [Titus] Cæsar he excused himself before God, as to this matter, and said, that “He had proposed peace and liberty to the Jews, as well as an oblivion of all their former insolent practices: but that they, instead of concord, had chosen sedition; instead of peace, war; and before satiety and abundance, a famine. That they had begun with their own hands to burn down that temple; which we have preserved hitherto: and that therefore they deserved to eat such food as this was. That however, this horrid action of eating an own child ought to be covered with the overthrow of their very country itself; and men ought not to leave such a city upon the habitable earth, to be seen by the sun, wherein mothers are thus fed, although such food be fitter for the fathers, than for the mothers to eat of; since it is they that continue still in a state of war against us, after they have undergone such miseries as these.” And at the same time that he said this, he reflected on the desperate condition these men must be in. Nor could he expect that such men could be recovered to sobriety of mind, after they had endured those very sufferings, for the avoiding whereof it only was probable they might have repented. (source)
Titus saw himself as a reasonable, benevolent besieger who was giving Jews a fair choice between peace and abundance (colonization and control) or destruction. Stationed outside their gates for weeks, keeping any food from getting in, he was shocked that violence would begin to manifest when people were pushed to the brink of despair and death. And since they had begun to behave in such a depraved way, he believed his only choice was to destroy them entirely.
I’m aware that Josephus Flavius is a controversial chronicler of the first Jewish-Roman War, as historians call it. A Jewish soldier who was enslaved by Romans and remained loyal to them, Josephus was for many centuries regarded as a traitor by Jews despite his self-proclaimed aim at impartiality in his historical chronicles. But here I am more interested in the insight he gives us into the mind of Titus than whether the story of Mary is even true. Titus’s reasoning sounds familiar, even in the 21st century: colonize a people, press them into the most desperate circumstances, beat them down when they retaliate, and then when they do something despicable as a result, punish them collectively all the while excusing yourself before God because they deserved it.
I am sure that Titus and his legions thought they had solved a problem in destroying a city and scattering its people. But like all creatures, humans are born to survive; genocide and ethnic cleansing are never the final solution that people think they will be. What the Romans did instead was expand the Jewish diaspora. Jews wandered further into Europe and the Mediterranean, prospering in some places, being persecuted in many others. It was from this wandering that 16th century Christians got the idea that the end times would come when all of the Jews were gathered back in Israel. (It’s important to remember that the prophetic writings in the Old Testament regarding the return of Jews to Israel were written long before the destruction of the Second Temple.) And that belief influenced the 19th century Jewish movement to re-establish a homeland for Jews—Zionism.
It is here that I say what few people want to hear right now: there is no form of legitimate violence, if by legitimate we mean that it is absolutely just or will stop further violence. That such a thing does not exist is history’s most obvious lesson. Sometimes situations get to a place where violence is inevitable. Sometimes violence is the lesser of two evils. Sometimes people are pushed to a brink of desperation where the only option that they can see is violence. But no violence is ever legitimate. Hamas’s killing and kidnapping of people is unacceptable. Israel’s ongoing 70 year campaign of colonialist violence against Palestinians is unacceptable. Saying this is different from saying that both sides are equal aggressors or have equal amounts of power. They do not. For those who object that self-defense is legitimate, I will say that Israel’s actions go far beyond self-defense, as they have already killed at least ten times the number of people Hamas killed* and have stated they have no intention of stopping. Meanwhile, people in Gaza—almost half of whom are children—are drinking contaminated water, are giving birth by flashlight, are undergoing surgery without anesthesia, are being killed by the hundreds every day.
In all this, I do not lose sight of the fact that the Jews are a traumatized people and that anti-Semitism is an ongoing threat to them. I’ve gestured toward events from 2,000 years ago to understand part of the reason, but the news of 80 years ago or just a few days ago, shows us why. I am not trying to erase the very real presence of anti-Semitism across the globe and its devastating consequences. But while that explains, although does not excuse, the Zionist creation of and siege on an open air prison half-full of children, I cannot help but wonder how the world would be different if the anti-Semitic states of Europe and elsewhere had approached reparations for Jews after the Holocaust as something other than a colonial project.
I write this knowing that, being a white, ethnically Christian citizen of the United States, I have much in common with Israeli citizens as a political subject. Yet I hear calls for the destruction of Gaza and I feel like I’m at the edge of a bottomless crater with no way to step back. All of our actions reverberate in this world after they have been taken; violent actions seem to be heard the loudest and longest. It is hard to ignore, in these calls for the destruction of Gaza, an echo of the destruction of Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans began a chain of events that led to where we are today, just as a chain of events led up to their choice to destroy Jerusalem. If Israel persists, Titus-like, in starving, besieging, and razing Gaza, many thousands more will die, many will be scattered, many more will be traumatized. And beyond that, what unforeseen consequences will there be, how far in the future will they manifest, and who will have to bear them?
* About 12,000 at the time this was written; the number at the time I publish this is almost 30,000 with almost 8,000 missing. Famine had not yet occurred in the first few weeks of the war, but now there is widespread famine within the Gaza strip due to Israel’s tight control of the aid that gets let in.