The inability to define violence in similar terms: in a time of conflict, it would be enough to ignite some hope
I can’t sleep a wink since the news of the attack that took place in the West Bank town of Hawara last Sunday. And not just for the pain, because we have loads of pain and suffering in our area. The harrowing images of the victims of violence and terrorism flash across our television screens every evening. This time, however, there is something unusual. More threatening. As if the earth itself had jerked under my feet.
When I was a child, my father, now deceased, who had grown into one shtetla small Jewish village in Eastern Europe, had explained to me why pogrom they were so traumatic and devastating. If your town is sacked by soldiers, or if your fellow villagers are slaughtered by an assassin or a terrorist, he said, you can still go to the nearby town to do the shopping, and when the shopkeeper smiles and greets you, you smile back. . But when you know that the attackers who attacked your neighbors and torched your house are from that very other city, and that the shopkeeper was perhaps one of them, you can no longer smile back. According to my father, the hatred that fuels every pogrom does not fade away with the last ember dying out in the smoking ruins. Indeed, it strengthens.
I shared these thoughts with my taxi driver the other day, but was rebuked sharply for calling Hawara’s bloody events a pogrom. He was keen to reiterate, the driver, that the word pogrom applies exclusively to violence against Jews. When we speak of attacks against other nationalities, we need a different term. I suggested hate crime to him, but that didn’t suit him either, because the mobs who targeted Hawara were driven by anger and grief over the horrendous murder of two young brothers that same day. And the terrorist himself, the taxi driver specified, was from Hawara. The term pain-motivated crime did not strike us as convincing, to either of us, because it sounds weak and imprecise, nor were we able to agree on a justified crime, because if justified, it is unlikely that it is actually a crime. My proposal for a crime against innocents did not please my taxi driver, and the ride was over even before a consensus was reached. I confess that I was saddened by it. After all, I’m a man who lives on words.
In these troubled days, in Israel and elsewhere in the world, in an age of conflict and hatred between opposing factions, if we were at least able to use the same words to define certain things, well, this would be enough to ignite a glimmer of hope. Four hundred Jews from nearby settlements joined the Israeli army and stormed a Palestinian city, where they beat and massacred the locals and set fire to the houses where the families had taken refuge. We have not been able to prevent it, e today there are members of this extremist government who are not even willing to condemn the massacre. But will we at least be able to find a name to define this tragedy?
March 1, 2023 (change March 1, 2023 | 22:08)
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