I dreamt last night of my late wife, Alison. I didn’t see or hear her, and I was in a mostly unfamiliar place, but her presence was unmistakable. I knew that we were somewhere in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge, where we used to live. We were dating in the dream, not yet married, and it was late, so I’d decided to go back home. For some reason, I had to go across the street to a pay phone to call an Uber. It was midnight, but paradoxically enough both bright as noon and dark enough to obscure the way. I called the Uber guy, who was hard to hear, but he said he was coming, and there the dream ended.

I woke up to a mental image of a reel I’d recently seen of the Israelis in Gaza. A bomb hit a building, throwing the inhabitants hundreds of feet into the air. The people hit were like tiny pin pricks of humanity, sprawling in space, sent to certain death. They looked a lot like gnats but for the knowledge that they weren’t. I couldn’t sleep with that image in my head, but it was 6 am, and I like to sleep in on Sundays, so I had to get rid of it somehow. I turned on an ASMR video, which worked like a charm. A pretty girl whispered something soothing in my ear, I’m not sure what. I finally managed to forget about Gaza, and eventually fell asleep.

Somewhere in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge

I awoke at 9 to the thought that I’d better eat the watermelon in the fridge before it goes bad. Shameful to let food go to waste during a famine. Think of the starving kids in Gaza. Turns out the watermelon had gone bad, along with the broccoli rabe right next to it. I threw them both on the compost heap, and more or less discarded my guilt with the same aplomb. I had to start the day somehow. 

I’ve normalized death in Gaza the way I’ve acclimated myself to the death of my wife. The grief rolls in like the tides, but then rolls out with the same inevitability. At low tide, life goes on and goes by. I realize then that not everybody’s wife has committed suicide, and that Gaza is for most a faraway foreign place. I can’t expect others to share my fixations, so I don’t. But the alienation is always there. 

Solidarity with like-minded activists helps, but only goes so far. We all feel the same way, but that doesn’t change the feeling itself. Every pain and every pleasure is now tinged, sometimes gripped, by the tidal apprehension of mass death in which we’re all commingled and entangled. The contempt and revulsion for a world that has put us in this predicament–condemned the victims to mass death, and sealed our hands around the lever that keeps them there–is ineradicable. It changes one’s calculus of costs and benefits in ways that others no doubt find incomprehensible. Inevitably, one stops caring about what moves other people, and cares only for what doesn’t. Their standards of care and of approbation, of right and wrong, of insult and accusation, have become irrelevant. So in some ways have they. 

I often dream of Alison, but never of Palestine. Perhaps it’s because Alison is dead but Palestine is in its death throes, and I can’t dream it until the event has finally come to pass. Alison’s grave remains unmarked, as she morbidly predicted it would be. The same prediction applies, I think, to Gaza.

We committed this crime, not distributively but collectively, in a kind of moral midnight that was at once broad noon and dark obscurity. We immersed ourselves in lies, covered ourselves in false righteousness, intoxicated ourselves in rationalizations, and in so doing, destroyed a whole society along with those who inhabited it.

I say “we,” not because each of us is guilty, or because all of us are, or even because so many are. I say it because what stands accused is not any particular person but the collective identities–“Western Civilization,” “the West,” “the Free World,” the “Civilized World”–so ubiquitously invoked on our behalf. The civilization that brought us anti-Semitism, that turned racism into a science, that industrialized slavery, totalitarianism, imperialism, and genocide, is now waving its alleged moral  and civilizational superiority in our faces as the excuse for its latest crimes. 

A bright, sunny Sunday here in Princeton

The primordial rationalization at the heart of the latest genocide is that “they started the war,” the implication being that the people of Gaza now deserve whatever we dish out to them, for however long, in whatever way. In fact, we started the war–every war in which Gaza has been involved since 1948. Well before October 2023, we drove the Palestinians from their homes, invaded them, expropriated them, robbed them, and murdered them en masse. Indeed, we’ve been doing this since the Alexandrian conquests. No competent history of Gaza omits these obvious facts, only the willfully incompetent ones. It’s been the task of the genocidal propaganda of the last two years to erase history and reverse the order of events–oceans of blood dissolved in oceans of lies. And people have bought it in droves.

It took the people of Gaza decades to muster a response in kind. And for all the hand-wringing over October 7, that’s all they did. They did to Israel what Israel had been doing to them for decades. At a bare minimum, they responded in a war-like fashion to Israel’s indiscriminate, civilian-targeting blockade, imposed on Gaza in 2007. A blockade is an act of war, enforced by bloodshed. So is any intelligible response to it. When Hamas et al attacked Israel on October 7, we fixated on it in horror, started the moral clock from that date, and have remained fixed there. But the mesmeric force of the event is really just a macabre form of narcissism. October 7 is simply a mirror, and all that it did was to reflect back to us the supposed moral majesty that is us. That act of lèse-majesté has been Gaza’s unforgivable offense. To paraphrase Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the villainy we taught them was executed on that date, and went hard, but apparently without bettering the instruction (Act 3, Scene 1). 

It’s a bright, sunny Sunday here in Princeton, breezy, balmy, and in the 70s. I’m well rested, and in a fairly good mood. So much to get done today. Alison is gone. Gaza is gone. The West Bank is next, and we’re next, too. I’m fine as long as I don’t dwell on that, and I don’t. But like an incoming tide, I feel its pull and see it when I look to the horizon. Like the return of the repressed, it finds its way to consciousness, and once there, leaves its mark. I live my life but dream of death. The two things co-exist, because they have to.

I owe the tidal metaphor I use here to an Instagram post by Katherine W. Bogen.