The Makhlokets of The Week: Part 1

I don't dare presume speak for anyone on the other side of this issue, but every Jewish generation has 'their' massacre: the Israel/Palestine massacre with which they came of age and they realized the full extent of this farkakter balagan we were born into. For the later millennial Jews it was Shuja'iyya. For our generation it was the Battle of Jenin. For gen-X it was Qana. For later Boomers it was Shabra and Shatilla. For early Boomers it was Red Sedr. For the Silent Generation it was Khan Yunis. For the 'Greatest Generation' it was Deir Yassin. And retrospectively, there have been a couple dozen Deir Yassins for us all.

Jewish history is so littered with dates and places on which we were massacred that after the initial shock, a new massacre doesn't register much. Obviously, Jews are still massacred; not nearly as often as pre-1950, but the butchery never went away. On the other hand, excepting October 7th, none of them seem dramatic enough to stick in the Jewish consciousness for thousands of years. I don't know what it's like for people old enough to remember the Munich Olympics, but even the massacre in Pittsburgh feels like a hundred years ago. We can't think about every massacre when within a year it's just another one among ten thousand for a people who always have a new one to mourn.

But massacres perpetrated BY us, massacres that MAY have been perpetrated by us, massacres we are accused of perpetrating, SOMETIMES legitimately? That is something unique that occupies our generations of Jews our whole lives long. Jews may think these events are discussed too much in the wider world, as though people can absolve themselves of their own historical guilt by catching Jews red-handed in our own atrocities, but Jews discuss these events in private still more than any antisemite. These events touch on exactly where Jews are most sensitive, most insecure, most resentful, most fearful. You cannot blame a peoplehood embattled for so long, who've been falsely accused of mass murder (not just deicide) for so many centuries past, for perceiving all the thousands of ways in which these accusations are deeply unfair long before they see that many of these accusations are true.

I've been experiencing these queasy events my entire lifetime, and so have my parents, and yet they still feel strange. We don't know what to make of circumstances like that because there hasn't been much instance of it since the Tanakh (Bible) was codified. Just as no Jews since biblical times have experienced the responsibilities of a people who own their land, no Jews since biblical times experienced the consequential horrors of owning a land.

Don't misunderstand: there's no era of Jewish history when we weren't accused of massacres during our entire time in exile, but during the 2000 years of diaspora, those accusations were a travesty--usually perpetrated by a theocratic autocracy on a public they deliberately kept stupid. But the world has changed over the last 2000 years. There's no better evidence of the world's evolution than the State of Israel, so when a large group of Jews are accused of politically motivated murder, it is no longer a given that these Jews are innocent.

And therefore, no critical tradition exists, nor a philosophical tradition, nor a Rabbinic tradition, nor even an oral tradition, about how Jews should handle political atrocities that may be committed by Jews.

In Biblical times, massacre was just what people did on a Tuesday. People basically expected their lives would end in some kind of murder. The most civilized places like Rome and Greece were often the cultures that killed with the greatest alacrity in the greatest number, and the bloodiest war leaders were the most praised: Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samson, David, Joab, Elijah, Judah--all Biblical heroes, all mass murderers who today would be carted off to the Hague unless Israel maintains bipartisan American support. The only great Jewish leader who had a thoroughly modern taste for peace was Solomon, but with regard to women Solomon would have been metoo'd so quickly that he'd have to impart his wisdom on youtube.

It's an unfortunate fact for Jews that the Western world began to look at war as a shameful pursuit only after the Tanakh was written. The Western pursuit of peace doesn't begin with Christianity, but it begins in time for Christianity to take up pacifism as a banner pursuit about which most converts have never heard. No movement in world history advanced pacifism's cause more than Christianity, and there can be no better argument against pacifism than that no movement ever since, not even Islam, killed with anything like the efficacy of Christianity and Christendom.

So after so much history, both for Jews and the world, here we are, after roughly two thousand 'years of our lord,' and only now have Jews begun wrestling with the modern implications of what it means to be the killers instead of the killed.

There's nothing in the Mishna about what to do in case two Jewish extremist militias carry out a massacre and forced evacuation during the Israeli War of Independence: a massacre against a town that signed a non-aggression pact with the main Zionist defense force. No sage commented on what to do in case there's some evidence that all the Jewish military forces were working together. Consequently, many Jews deny it ever happened. Some Jews acknowledge it happened and say it was justified. Some Jews acknowledge it happened but deny that the main defense force had any involvement. Some Jews point to that historians lowered the death toll over time to say that the whole thing is clearly exaggerated. Other Jews not only acknowledge it happened, but believe a few hundred other towns experienced massacres exactly like it. Many among those who believe this massacre happened in hundreds of towns believe it invalidates the entire State of Israel. Some others even say that while this massacre happened, it didn't happen hundreds of times, but it should have. A few even believe it happened hundreds of times over, but didn't happen nearly often enough, and wish that the genocide was carried out right away that Israelis have been accused of perpetrating ever since. But no matter what their belief, what happened at Deir Yassin is the central event in the whole Israel/Palestine conflict. Whether or not it was just the first of many violent evacuations of Palestinians by Israelis, or whether it caused a panicked Palestinian stampede into Gaza and the West Bank, it is basically the event around which the whole conflict revolves. So there isn't a single Jew able to think about what happened at Deir Yassin with a completely level head.

There is no tractate in the Gemara about a massacre (and worse) in 80s Lebanon of a refugee camp perpetrated by an extremist militia of Lebanese Christians fighting on the same side as the Israelis. No Israeli soldier seems to have been directly involved in the killing, but the Israeli army patrolled the exits and blocked residents from leaving. Some Jews say that the Israeli army had nothing to do with it and had no foreknowledge. Some say that we knew, but you can't blame the perpetrators because Lebanese Christian leader (just elected President) had just been assassinated by Syrian Muslims, and their army was out for Muslim blood, so if Israel didn't let them sack something, the Christians might have turned on the Israelis. Others say that the number of killed was vastly exaggerated. Many others allege that the operation was an unfortunate necessity since the camp was one of the Palestine Liberation Organization's main training grounds. Some say that however much culpability Israel held for the massacre, it was less of an outrage than that the UN's report about it holding Israel guilty of genocide. Most Jews, of course, say that Israel's Defense Minster had gone rogue and was pursuing his own policy behind the backs of his Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. No matter what happened, the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla may technically be a Lebanese event, but the heads of Israelis and Jews have been reconstructing the circumstances of those three days with a level of detail worthy of the Kennedy Assassination. About Sabra and Shatilla, we've constructed our daf of Talmud.

And then there's what happens when you're trying to process history in real time. There's nothing in the Shulchan Aruch about what to do when the casualty reports from a battle in a West Bank enclave range so widely that it's absolutely impossible to know what happened. Some sources put it at 500 dead Palestinians, another puts it at 50 dead Palestinians, and more confusingly, there are sources on both sides reporting both extremes.

Both sides are arming their faithful with propaganda from minute 1. You're getting emails telling you it was a massacre, and emails telling you that the people who want you to think there was a massacre want you to be massacred. Say the wrong thing to someone on either side and you get the ear thrashing of the century for the slightest deviation from their party line (guess who did from both sides...). You could hear literally every possible reconstruction of what happened in Jenin. Everything from 'There was no massacre in Jenin' to 'If there was a massacre, there was a damn good reason for it.'

And we would read everything: On the one hand, we'd read that Jenin was known as 'The Martyrs Capital' because Jenin was known as where most suicide bombers got their training and arms and that 23 suicide bombers were dispatched from Jenin just in the last two years; that the Palestinian forces had booby trapped Jenin house by house and the IDF broadcast in Arabic warning civilians to leave the camp. We'd also read that Israeli trucks would remove dozens of Palestinian bodies at a time before any outside observer was let in. Even Israeli TV broadcast refrigerator trucks taking the bodies of what we were assured were combattants to 'terrorist cemeteries.' Even the Israeli High Court issued a moratorium on Israel's transfer of bodies out of Jenin. Then we read that these trucks were there so that army reservists slept in them for heat relief and safety, and Palestinians who happened on them misinterpreted what they saw and spread the rumor that the trucks were full of dead Palestinian bodies

No Maimonides, Rashi or ibn-Khaldun could make sense of all this. It's not just a battle of bodies and bullets, it's a battle of narratives, and every detail of this narrative battle is fought so intensely that it's impossible for anyone to swear that anything about it is true at all if they don't want to sink their integrity. So great is the intensity all this inspires that even the people who were there aren't reliable witnesses.

The Jewish people have no millennia long experience in how to establish collective innocence or guilt because for two-thousand years, we were always the innocent.