I was texting today with a friend in the West Bank. I ranted awhile about The Situation. He made no effort to join in. Finally, he said:

I promise you to be peaceful and to teach my people that.

It seemed to come from out of nowhere, but maybe that’s because I’d been monopolizing the conversation. I told him that peace was best, but that we all have a right to defend ourselves. He didn’t respond. An hour after that, he sent me videos of the Israeli military invading his village, driving vehicles with proud Stars of David flags affixed to them, smashing down doors, doing house-to-house searches, etc. etc. Injunctions to peaceful non-violence seem anemic in this context; invocations of the right to self-defense, futile.

I’ve written thousands of words in the last few days that I’d intended to post here, but none of it really came out right. In one sense, there’s too much to process to be able to articulate it all; in another sense, there’s nothing left to say. It’s a field day for propagandists and lovers of ideology. It leaves the rest of us subdued. Not defeated. Just subdued. 

One of the worst things about grief is the way it pulls you into yourself, and away from the world. But that’s also its saving grace. A world inhospitable to bereavement is uninhabitable, as for the time being, ours is. A reasonable person can hardly be blamed for wanting to leave it for a better place. As Montaigne puts it, “we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.” That’s where I’m headed.

There will–I hope–be a time to sift and collate the rights and wrongs of this conflict, to distinguish truth from falsity, and candor from abject lies. But not now. I can’t promise when.

In the second of a series of posts I wrote two years ago, I had this to say:

Little by little, the wholesale Israeli subjugation of Palestine is becoming a reality. And little by little, the ticking time-bomb of rage it has so long suppressed is ticking its way to resolution. Don’t be surprised when, emboldened by events in Kabul, Palestinians start to give in to desperation and despair. When it happens, if it happens, it’ll have taken them a long time, and the patience of martyrs, to get there. Martyrdom, after all, is grit played in a tragic key, and played at a volume that temporarily deafens its audience. The problem with Americans is that they’re congenitally tone deaf to tragedy–even the ones they’re responsible, or at least half-responsible, for having brought it about. As they are here.

Ignorant armies don’t need me to do the work of clashing by night. Neither do the people cheering them on. The prize they’ve both won is a stranglehold on the attentions of the present. Reality will teach them how fleeting that all is, and how much effort is required to hold on to it. I’m content to learn from their mistakes. They can revel in making them.