Faith, Love, and War in Israel: Janet Lucas’s Call for the United States to intervene in the conflict between Israel and Palestine
Aziza Hasan, a devout Muslim, looked out at the group gathered around her, spoke of the loved ones who had died in Israel and Gaza and began reciting the first chapter of the Quran.
“On my right side is Gabrielle, God’s strength,” she told the crowd, translating the song. “Behind me, God’s healer, Raphael. Above my head is God’s divine presence.”
Los Angeles was the scene of several bloody battles between Israel and its neighbors to the north, east and south, as well as an earthquake that sent fearful shock waves through the city.
More than 500 Muslims and Jews have been helped by NewGround, a program that teaches them to listen, disagree, and empathise with one another.
Randy Schmidt, 60, a dairy farmer in Lone Rock, Wis., said the president’s appeal for military aid would be hard to sell in the area.
When the voters there went for President Trump in the 2020 election, they ended up voting for the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1980.
Money comes hard here, he said. It has been difficult for us to farm this year. I believe we support Israel, but I don’t think we can do that much.
In suburban Milwaukee, however, the questions posed by the violence in the Middle East and Ukraine were less economic than moral for Janet Lucas. The terrorist attacks against Israelis were triggering for her.
“I understand that there has been a fight between the two for years and years,” said Ms. Lucas, 58. The way that the killings of Hamas and the kidnapping of Israeli families were dealt with broke her heart. “It took me back to 9/11 — the same feeling, the same fear of, you know, is it going to happen to us, or who’s next?”
She went to Holy Hill on Friday to take in the fall colors with her son who was in town from Florida. They felt that they had to agree with the president’s call to support Israel. They sympathized with Palestinians and the discrimination they have had to endure, but could not condone terrorist attacks.
“There are times when I sit in the middle, because I can see both sides of it,” Janet Lucas said. Is it possible for the United States or any other country to help them to achieve some form of peace?
“My Heart Is Broken“: David Myers’s View of Israel-Palestine Symmetry and Palestine’s Equilibrium
When you are watching a horrible thing happen far away from your home, it can take hold of you and make you feel uselessness, but that same thing is hurting your friends and neighbors.
The war in Israel and Gaza has created this web of shared grief connecting friends and strangers. In the days right after the Hamas attack, my neighbor was worried about her extended family in Israel who she was having a hard time tracking down.
I am not related to Jews or Palestinians. This is not the case for those whose existence is at stake. I have to come up with a conversation that makes us feel like we are all connected. There is no easy spiritual panacea for these horrors. There is no one single conversation that can give an account of the pain experienced over generations by everyone who was involved in the struggle for land and God.
An op-ed by a professor at UCLA was the reason I read it. His name is David. He wrote a piece for the paper that tried to establish a point of equilibrium between Jews and Palestinians on the campus.
I felt like there was hope in that idea, so I reached out to see if he’d be willing to talk. I wanted a long view. A historian’s take. Because it is possible the pain is lessened with distance. It became apparent very quickly that historians are here in the present and they can’t help but find it hard to deal with.
David Myers: Terribly. My heart is broken. I’m grieving, mourning, angry, bewildered, scared — all of those things. And I realize I’m not there. I’m not in Israel-Palestine. I’m at a remove. So what can it be that’s on the ground? I spend a lot of time there, but I’m not there now. and I’m feeling all of these things It’s almost unbearable. I spend my time teaching, doing media appearances, and then disappearing back into a cave of depression.
How did things start to change on the campus? Because UCLA, like many college campuses around the country, has been beset with a lot of students who are angry, who are hurt, who are suffering, who want justice for all the people who’ve lost their lives. How did you see all of that emotion start to manifest and bubble up?
Myers: I think what I encountered was a great deal of mystification about how students on the other side of the divide failed to understand where they were. It was not so much about, “Can you help me understand what happened?” but more about, “How could that group be so ignorant and lacking in basic empathy?”
I did. Some of the groups represent those supporters of Israel who are Jewish and some of the groups are not.
I think both bear within them a deep sense of grievance. The Jewish students or the pro-Israel students feel like the progressive left, with whom they have natural solidarity on many other issues, refused to condemn unequivocally a massacre of Jews. And those who support the Palestinian cause believe that the university and the broader political culture of the United States are insufficiently attentive to the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Israel hamas palestinians gaza religion: Implications for the Palestinians’ lives, and for the future of the Jewish Diaspora
Myers: What became clear was that I had to write something that made the very simple and intuitive claim that now is the time to recognize the humanity of all. Now is not the time, at least for me, to take sides.
I knew that that would elicit many suggestions that I was a traitor to my people, the Jewish people. I knew that the claims that I had neglected to understand the suffering of the Palestinian people would be heard. But I had to write what I had to write. And I believe it’s not only intuitive, it’s the moral place where I need to be.
Which is to say, it is an absolute moral imperative to condemn without equivocation the massacre that took place on October 7th. The suffering that the Palestinians in Gaza are enduring is something that is morally imperative to attend to, and there is more to it than meets the eye.
In the best of situations, people often have to choose sides. Now, in this environment, it’s understandable why people feel they can’t hold on to both. I would ask, can there not be a small portion of our hearts that can be used for the other?
I don’t consider myself to be a morally better person than the average, but I do think it’s important to try to in such moments, as a manifestation of our humanity, carve out a small portion that can allow us to empathize.
Source: His call for empathy has made this Jewish studies professor feel isolated
What do we really do, and how do we break them? What does it take to break the mold? A prayerful answer to Martin’s question
Martin said that part of his job was looking back through time and identifying patterns and teaching students how to break them. As people, as societies. How do you do that in this conflict when the same cycles of violence repeat themselves over and over for generations?
Myers: Yeah. And those cycles are rooted in profound traumas, which in some sense clashed with one another. The trauma of the Holocaust, of course, known to almost all, and the trauma of the Nakba, of the displacement and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war. I guess my answer to your question, Rachel, about how we break out of the mold, is to ask ourselves, how’s it going? What is it doing? It is not working well from what we’ve seen over the last two weeks. I think of the two siblings,Jacob andEsse, as being detrimental to their health because of that kind of death embrace.
It’s a very tricky question because I take solace in prayer and in community. I feel my community does not feel in alignment with me, in this period of time. And therefore I feel some measure of what many of us feel at this time, just extraordinary loneliness.
But I also see how, particularly the Psalms, offer sources of consolation. And open up the possibility of moving beyond where we are. And every day we say a verse, which I wrote down, because I carry it with me now. It says: “You turned my lament into dancing. You undid my sackcloth and girded me with joy.”