The sun rose, the acacia bloomed and the slayer slew

The first thing I thought of, on that horrendous Shabbat morning when I woke up to a couple of urgent text messages from my son in Israel—other than Oh no, not again!—was the above line (in my own translation) of Hayim Nahman Bialik‘s most devastating, profound poem: ‘In the City of Slaughter.’ Growing up in the kibbutz we studied that poem at length. In it, Bialik described in verse the dreadful slaughter of many Jews in the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom. This poem never left me. Especially that line above, which describes so succinctly, so poetically the banality of evil. The brutality of evil. The nature of evil; nature and evil one and all.

Of course, I’m not alone in making that connection to the pogroms of old. Indeed, following the ‘Massacre in the Desert,’ I’ve heard and read of not a few kibbutzniks, who survived the Hamas terrorists’ slaughter, describing what they experienced in similar words. It reminded them of a pogrom on the Jews all over again. We Jews, we keep saying, Never again. Israel was created and established foremost with that in mind: Never again! But here it was again: a slaughter of the Jews in the morning daylight. It did happen again.

The truth is, I still find it hard to process it all. It might take months not weeks to do so, if not years. And of course, we might be just at the beginning of this terrible war, its end unknown. So here are a few more observations on the situation, fragmented and randomly selected.

The Black Shabbat: Again, growing up in the kibbutz, the phrase ‘The Black Shabbat’ was notorious. Was taught and learned. Was a myth, sort of: the name given by new Israelis back then to “Operation Agatha by the British authorities in Mandatory Palestine of 1946. Soldiers and police searched for arms and made arrests in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and several dozen settlements; (i.e. kibbutzim and moshavim). The total number of British security forces involved is variously reported as 10,000 to 25,000. About 2,700 individuals were arrested, among them future Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. The officially given purpose of the operation was to end ‘the state of anarchy’ then existing in Palestine.” (According to Wikipedia).      

Did it do any good, the first Black Shabbat? No, it didn’t. In less than two years the state of Israel was established. And will continue to exist, I have no doubt, after the second, more atrocious Black Shabbat. But “Complacency killed,” I heard one analyst say on television. Yes, it did. And so did sleeping at the wheel, both in Israel and in America; both Netanyahu and Biden. They operated under the assumption that peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia—not one Saudi soldier ever raised one gun to shoot one bullet at one Israeli soldier—would take care of the “Palestinian Problem.” Would push it to the sidelines. All indications on October 6^th were that, under this ‘normalization’ deal-in-the-making, the Palestinian people and their political aspirations would get some political crumbs. Not much more.

Of course Netanyahu, the longest serving Israeli Prime Minister, had always done—lied, deceived, manipulated and worst—all he could to squash the notion of establishing a Palestinian state, existing side by side with Israel. He, and his coalition of rightwing settlers extremists, with messianic Jewish supremacy ideas, were set on, sooner or later, annexing the entire West Bank. And look where it got him. And us. So pity that Biden and Blinken bought into it. Now they are paying the price for that folly, too. At least, as I write this column, Biden already declared that “There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6. That means ensuring that Hamas can no longer terrorize Israel and use Palestinian civilians as human shields. It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and in our view it has to be a two-state solution.” Better late than never.

Words are cheap, though, actions are pricy. So we shall see. I had an idea the other day that, like fifty years ago, in the first national disaster of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, something good would come out of this disaster at the end. Like peace with Egypt and later Jordan, back then, so it will be now with the Palestinian people. But here comes the great Israeli author David Grossman, with the deepest insight into the Israeli people’s mentality and physics, and writes (in The Times of Israel) that “If I may hazard a guess: Israel after the war will be much more right-wing, militant, and racist.” If true, fat chance for a Palestinian state and peaceful coexistence.

In the Washington Post, another great Israeli writer, historian and thinker Yuval Noah Harari, wrote: “If Hamas’s war aims are indeed to derail the Israeli-Saudi peace treaty and to destroy all chance for normalization and peace, it is winning this war by a knockout. And Israel is helping Hamas, largely because Netanyahu’s government seems to be conducting this war without clear political goals of its own.” Again, truly observed. And so did the French newspaper Le Monde, saying in an editorial: “Today, Western governments are paying for their inability to find, or even to seek, a solution to the Palestinian question.”

Tell me it ain’t so, dear friends and readers. But it is. Other observers and a multitude of commentators are shouting in the digital social squares that Israel never committed atrocities against the Palestinian People. But it did (and still does, in the West Bank). Check the recent Israeli documentary film Tantura, describing the slaughter of an entire peaceful Arab fishing village by Israeli soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade early in the 1948 War of Independence. “You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people,” says Ilan Pappé, (as reported on the film by the Los Angeles Times) a professor at the University of Haifa, about the post-World War II founding of the state of Israel in the blistering and defiant documentary Tantura.” No wonder the Palestinians call it the Nakba (the catastrophe).

There are other such stories, in this brutal, perpetual struggle and war, but I won’t go there today. I’m not writing here to compare, but to remind. Truth be told, I’m just in a constant Loop of Pain, as Haviva Man said about Amit Man, her sister, who was taken hostage by Hamas. “We’re in an unbelievable loop of pain, uncertainty and helplessness.”

Not knowing her, I join her in this ‘loop of pain’ and worry. For my family living in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, I worry. For my nephew on the Gaza border, a soldier in the Golani Brigade, I worry; though after fighting bravely already against the infiltration of Hamas terrorists, he is eager to march into battle again, into a ground operation in Gaza to avenge the death of his comrades in arms. How many more Israeli soldiers must die, and how many more Palestinian babies must be slaughtered, for this cycle of violence to end? Until the sun won’t rise again? Until the acacia won’t bloom again? Until the slayer will stop slaying?

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The Smile of The Snake

AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali

The smile of the snake is beguiling, my friends, and can’t be freely resisted. The secret of that smile is equally baffling, its origin is obscure, and can’t be easily deciphered. Let’s see, though, whether we can try and solve it together by exploring its roots. Recent history had taught us that when the snake had smiled so charmingly, putting under his spell both American Christians and American Jews, that wasn’t surprising. After all, he pledged to give them the Promised Land on a silver platter. Like the ‘child who doesn’t know how to ask a question’ in the Passover Haggadah, they didn’t ask any questions. Good people as they were, still are, they took him at point value.

And so, when he proceeded to smile, just before devouring President Barack Obama for breakfast, they were still not alarmed. I, for one, was not surprised at all that he’d eaten him alive with such ease. I was somewhat surprised, admittedly, when just a short time later the snake—he was still hungry, apparently—was able to swallow Secretary of State John Kerry alive for lunch too. The Secretary was more experienced in the ways of the world than the president, with war and its aftermath under his belt, so I expected more resistance to the snake’s smile from him. And yet, he succumbed to the temptation of that serpent just as easily.

I was sure, however, that the snake would never be able to fool the current president, Joe Biden, with such ease. After all, the current president has the advantage of old age, both personally and politically. However, as experienced and crafty as he is, ultimately he is no match for the charismatic smile of the snake. The president has been fooled, too. The president has been charmed, too. And though he’s resisted the temptation to believe in the snake’s deviousness longer than Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama had done, in the end, he too has been swollen and has been eaten for dinner.

How to account for it? How to solve the riddle of this smile, its overwhelming power, and what really stands behind it? I admit, it is hard, but let’s remember first who the abovementioned three American in essence are. They’re all tall men, both in stature and in character. They stand for something. They believe in principles, in values, in the political system of democracy, in give and take and compromise and, above all else, they believe in the triumph—difficult as it may be to achieve sometimes—of good over evil. To believe in those things a certain measure of naiveté is required. A definite belief, whether in God, nature, or humanity—or even in all of these together—is absolutely necessary.

While virtue demands having principles, evil requires none. Power, survival of the fittest, its only game. The snake, you see, by his very nature, possesses none of the qualities that make us human. His urge to survive, while in power, rules above all else. He was born in the wild and will die in the wild. His instincts are such that they are directed solely to the pursuit of survival. It’s in his DNA; it’s bestowed on him from generation to generation. But because of humanity, and the pressure and changes it had brought with it such as culture, heritage, and democracy—even the illusion of democracy—the snake was left with no options but to fight hard against such tendencies to destroy his familiar territorial wilderness and habitat. He had developed, therefore, a seventh sense to survive in such a world.

That sense became his smile. He realized that when you smile, you welcome the prey into your sphere of gravity. When, for instance, you tell Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama that achieving peace with the Palestinians is important to you, they believe you. Such is their nature. Same, when you tell them that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the best solution there is, and that you believe in it, they believe you. How naive of them. They take you at your word—how stupid of them. And when you tell them that you need their money, their support in the United Nations, and all the most sophisticated weapons in the world in order to secure that peace, they rush to oblige. No questions asked. You tell them what they want to hear, you smile at them, and then you go your way and destroy any chance for that peace by continuing with the occupation and expanding of the settlement endeavor.

It is for that reason that the snake had been able to survive for so long. For that reason, he’d been able to fool so many people for so long. It goes back, you see, to the Garden of Eden. Even in his own family of people, in his own country, he’s been able to survive for so long because people have believed in him. And they believed in him especially because of his beguiling, deceiving smile. That’s why other leaders, during his long career, whether by his fault or others’ fault under his influence, had fallen to the sideway, either assassinated or stricken by mysterious illnesses. And yet he’d survived.

His political father lives and thrives in Russia. His name is Vladimir Putin. And he’d taught him all these dirty tricks, and had taught him the riddle of the smile: how to smile, how to fool, how to strike venom, how to kill. What it does to everybody around him, the destruction it brings is none of his concerns. And yet inside him, because of this poisonous smile, the venom spreads too. Even the snake will die one day. He will shed his skin and die. And while during his lifetime he’d been able to fool most, if not all people to trust him, to believe in him, to respect his word—most of all to surrender under the spell of his smile—after his death, history will judge him gravely and accurately.

The death and destruction that such snakes leave behind them are irreversible. It cannot be undone. In Israel, for instance, even if miraculously things will change tomorrow for the better, and return suddenly to normal (if there is such a thing there), the damage has been done irrecoverably.  But for the sake of future generations, it’s important to figure out the riddle of the smile and call it what it is: a big, fat lie. Because the snake that smiles, breeds and feeds on our innocence. And we cannot allow ourselves to be innocent any longer. Otherwise, history will repeat itself.

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