A Music Festival Massacre

The Latest Grief Between Israel and the Palestinians

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

There are so many potential ways into a story as long and tragic and sad as Israel and Palestine, so why not go meta out the gate? Let’s talk about what context is and what it isn’t. Context is the information that surrounds a story. It isn’t the story itself, which is usually some sort of emotional through line, the stakes for a person or people. Such context, i.e. details, add to a story; it strengthens and builds it up.

What context isn’t, on the other hand, or what it doesn’t or can’t do—and this is one of the great conceits of contemporary progressivism, from people who have real storytelling power—is cloud or get in the way of the facts on the ground of a particular episode that the world deserves to know about. You don’t ignore the present because of the past just because the past is important and deserves a hearing. You don’t dismiss an injustice because there were other injustices before it. That is a very dangerous game, the kind of thing Gandhi was surely referring to when he said that “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”—if he ever really said such a thing. So if you’re a journalist or a filmmaker or even an activist who wishes to say something about the massacre that occurred throughout Israel on October 7, you can and probably should include some context about how Israel became a country, about the material conditions of the Palestinian Territories, about the history of violent conflict between these two groups; you just don't stop there.

I have been to Israel, in January 2020, right before the pandemic swept through the West and temporarily killed much of our travel and literally only a few days after the Trump Administration assassinated Qasem Soleimani, prompting a weak response in the direction of an American military target and rhetorical threats about bombing Tel Aviv. And though I studied the Middle East a bit in college (post 9-11 and all that), I’m no historical scholar myself, but even I knew could recognize at an event at a university some time before my trip that a booth about the conflict was pitiful in its presentation of something that is almost endlessly complicated. It’s not just that the material was one-sided (it was), it’s that people like me who filtered through would learn almost nothing from the exhibit, and if you asked the hosts any questions, their claims would topple almost as soon as words came out of their mouths because they did not know what they were talking about. They had an idea about the good guys verses the bad guys, the oppressors against the oppressed. If these are valid concepts at all—and I think they are in the most extreme of cases, while overused pretty much everywhere else—well then the details have to get laid out. In general, it is okay not to know some things (we can’t know everything!), but it becomes a problem when you know very little about that which you have strongly-held views and about which you expect others to, too.

Now this particular memory was a concoction put together by students (though surely encouraged by adults who should, but didn’t want to, know better). And of course you can’t include the appropriate context if you haven’t first done some research, but those reporting from the ground and in prominent publications have no such excuse, and this is ultimately my point, again, about context: it never ought to be used to obscure what happened in a particular scenario.

I’m not a news junkie, but as I pointed out in a recent post, thankfully I have found some folks who are committed (enough) to tell the truth, and so a particularly awful picture has emerged of what happened last week in Re-im, Israel, at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, which is just to the east of the Gaza Strip, a small Palestinian Territory alongside the Mediterranean Sea coast. Oddly the Gaza Strip is on the West Coast of Israel, and the West Bank is on the east side of the country. Jerusalem sits right at the border between contemporary Israel’s east-central edge and the Palestinians’ West Bank, and both “sides” consider it their de facto capital. However, Israel holds the political power there, thanks in large part to influential allies outside the Middle East. What we know is that gunmen from Iran-funded Hamas (which hold the political power in Gaza) showed up in vans and on motorized paragliders and began mowing down attendees very early in the morning. At least 260 people were killed (that number seems to be rising quickly and significantly, especially when considering other sites that were attacked on the same day), and there appears to have been some sexual humiliation on women who were victim to the attack as well. One woman’s killing was taped and posted by the killer on her own Facebook account. From other attacks in nearby locations on the same day, there have been reports of chopped-up bodies of children.

Like pretty much any other country in the world would do, Israel is retaliating and will continue to. It won’t be pretty. Thankfully mainstream Democrats have largely acknowledged the horrors at the music festival, though the massacre has not-so-subtly been celebrated by demonstrators in American cities who are obsessed with notions of “resistance” and “de-colonization.” I’ve seen at least one picture of a Nazi sign getting flashed about, and then there it was right on my Facebook feed: “Fuck Israel. #freepalestine.”

Now, I thought? It was posted by someone I respect but don’t know that well, someone I have worked with and did see in his own vulnerable spot at least one time. I don’t know the reason for his passion and certainly did not ask him about it; it could be that he has Palestinian lineage or has done some studying about the conflict. Even so, if this is the Revolution, I don’t intend to be part of it.

The word “occupation” is an interesting one as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and elsewhere, and I’ll confess to not knowing exactly what it means in a contemporary and legal sense. Okay, so the U.S. occupies Puerto Rico because we have some power over it, it isn’t its own country, but it also isn’t fully-integrated as a U.S. state. I’m the kind of person who thinks Puerto Rico should be the 51st state, but even so, what makes, say, Alaska not occupied? Or even one of the other U.S. states, Montana or Idaho? Is it just because the U.S. states agree to be part of these United States? Then why fight a war when some of them try to secede? Is there much of a self-determination movement in Puerto Rico? And once they do rule themselves, will they still, you know, want/need the support of U.S. resources? Do they want to fully rule themselves?

Get my point? Legality is a social contract (or mandate) rather than natural or biological phenomena; it requires a degree of agreement and therefore often results in disputes that usually get solved by, well, some combination of economic, political, and military power. Not to mention that there is also a stark difference between the simple rhetoric of freedom and the operational competence it takes to run the organization of masses of people.

So why did I, a 30-something American, spend a couple thousand bucks to roam around Israel? Well, the opportunist in me had a sister who was going there for work, and saw an opportunity for a hotel floor to sleep on as I roamed around a place that seemingly the whole world has an interest in. And as someone who grew up in Christian circles, and who has read much of the Bible, I considered the trip as something of a spiritual pilgrimage. That’s what I wanted it to be, anyway.

The reality, of course, was different. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t hop on a few tours (while reading N.T. Wright’s book about Israel, The Way of the Lord) and have the Garden of Gethsemane pointed to me, and walk into the religious building where Christ was supposedly born and a different one where he was supposedly crucified. Another tour guide pointed to the supposed tree in which Zacchaeus was sitting before his encounter with Jesus. I floated in the Dead Sea. Lots of time and effort getting from one location to the next, but though I had come hoping and looking to feel something inspiring or directional, I mostly didn’t find it.

I had, actually, an altogether-different sense: the whole thing was a market, a tourist trap, perhaps even the kind of thing wherein Jesus might have entered and started throwing shit around for prostituting houses of God. This is probably not a surprising experience or observation, and yet it was jarring for me, even as there were definite parallels between my own consumptive methods for achieving spiritual enlightenment and the folks on the other side who were trying to engineer that experience for me. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that one of the results of this is disappointment.

An exception to my emotional experience of the place was that of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. That was place was packed and full of buzz. When I say buzz, I could hear the rituals that were being enacted all around, but I could also feel the energetic importance of what the place meant to these people (even without a great understanding of its history). There was an energy in the air, and maybe what I was really feeling was the sincerity of it. This place was important to this people.

On my way out of the country, by the way, I was more than grilled by suspicious, uniformed men at the airport. I don’t know if it’s because of my brief history of living in Northern Ireland (another place rife with historical land disputes and “terrorism”) or if it was because I was a young man traveling by myself and whose electronics probably got tracked as I toured my way into the Palestinian Territories (did you know that Bethlehem is in Palestinian territory?), but I do know that something about me was flagged in the system. As other travelers plowed right beside me, I could feel the men’s suspicion toward me as they asked me specific question after specific question about my whereabouts, about the reason for my visit, about whether or not I had encountered any weapons during the past three days, about where I lived and what kind of work I did back home. One can also see how this kind of regular scrutiny would get tiring, and quickly.

Is God in the land? Yes and no, is my best guess. Meaning: I mostly didn’t find God in Israel, though events like last week’s remind us that Palestinians hold parts of Israel so sacred that they are prepared to kill (or die) for it, as do some Israelis. And this is, at least in part, why two-state proposals tend to fall short on the matter. What if the two groups don't like each other, and want the same real estate?

While Palestine isn’t now and wasn’t then an internationally-recognized country (and has repeatedly turned down to state-solution offerings, which don't poll that well in Palestinian territories), Israel as a nation was something of landing spot for Jewish refugees following World War II. The solution to the old problem became a new problem. We do well to remember all of that, though people seem to love pretending not to. My more-Zionist father would say Jewish rights to what we now know as Israel go much farther back, and he would use the Bible as his evidence for such conviction.

But how far back ought we to go in determining who gets what land? No matter how enlightened and ‘better than people from history’ we love to consider ourselves, it’s not a question we have great answers for. And so, we keep fighting for it.