But this is the middle of October, 2023. Hamas' massacres in Israel happened five days before my first visitor. By today, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have also died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced by Israeli reprisals; many have been killed in the West Bank, too. The hostages taken by Hamas remain in captivity, even as all of Gaza is held hostage by the shutting off of its access to water, electricity and medicines.
And we had to have class! My visitors, both Americans but E Jewish and R Muslim, gave voice to the profound grief they and their communities are experiencing, not only because of the loss of life but because of the reactions of others to these losses and threats, ranging from indifference to bloodlust. These reactions, we learned, resonated with deep and defining histories of hurt.
E spoke to us about anti-semitism in the west - cavils and conspiracies having little to do with Jewish life and "religion" (though rooted in Christian narratives) but depressingly, frighteningly persistent. If Hamas' attack was horrific - the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Shoah - the response among many non-Jews here was too, especially in the progressive circles where we move, where the victims were ignored, their killers excused or even celebrated. Are Jewish lives so expendable to them? Had they - had she - ever really been accepted as fellow human beings worthy of life? E spoke of being overcome by grief for "dead Palestinians and dead Israelis," a grief the articulation of whose breadth is seen as betrayal on both sides.
R, speaking a week later, as the United States government has aligned itself with the Israeli state and members of both political parties have endorsed a near-genocidal siege of Gaza, shared the bitterness of Muslims who are forever having to beg to recognized as human in western contexts where the Muslim is persistently associated with the medieval, the barbarous, violence. I'd introduced "orientalism" in the class a few weeks ago but realized I'd only scratched the surface. The foundational premising of the west's very identity on its distinction from the 'oriental' makes our efforts to correct these issues, R said, seem merely "rhetorical." She and others in her generation are "gutted" at the return of the same islamophobia as during 9/11.
What a gift these were, painful but precious. I learned an enormous amount, and students surely did too. I have learned to recognize the dehumanizing cadences - sometimes implicitly and even explicitly genocidal - of many reactions to the situation. But I've also realized that I have no experience remotely analogous to the intergenerational traumas they described. I could only wanly observe (to myself) that the collision of these histories in Palestine/Israel allowed outsiders culpably to misunderstand what was going on, whether supposing there is an eternal enmity between Jews and Muslims (when in fact, R reminded us, there were 1400 years of coexistence) or thinking what's happening there is not deeply entangled with the ideas - religious, historical, "modern"- of the rest of us, especially those who think ourselves better than the histories of the "old world."
