I have enjoyed the privilege of spending some time with an old friend the past few months.  We grew up together in our teens, and then found ourselves separated by too much geography as we lived our lives.  Now, some four decades later, we are frequently in the same city at the same time and find occasions to get together.

It is refreshing to reminisce.  More importantly, we realize how much our shared roots of experience have nourished and shaped our perspectives despite not crossing paths for so many years.  Even as our lives moved in dramatically different directions, there was still a collective past that shaped our futures.  Spending time reminiscing and catching up has not only renewed our memories of youth, but has also helped us make sense of our separate experiences and better comprehend the present.  In doing so, our common roots have been invigorated.  Yes, as Kierkegaard noted, we live our lives looking forward even as we understand our lives only in reverse.  It is the now that illuminates and helps us better understand the past and prepare for the future.  But such illumination is not a one way street.  Today’s present is tomorrow’s past, and will shape our future depending on the heed and diligence that we use to honor and understand what is happening around us.

This is why the events of October 7^th in Israel are important to all of us today.  The orc-like murderous rampages of Hamas reveal the evil that Israel has been forced to endure.  I have since pondered the moral clarity that should have been so self-evident to all – but unfortunately is willfully fogged over or distorted and leads to the abundant confusion in rich supply manifest among too many friends and family.  Even now, some five months later, these friends and family stumble in disorder and darkness.

I have also recognized that my own journey towards understanding the so called “complexities” of Israel and Palestine has been somewhat embarrassing.  I hope it isn’t too self-indulgent to try to explain.  While still a teenager, I found myself living in what was then West Berlin.  It was the early 1980s, and I lived in a small attic apartment a few blocks from the Berlin Wall.  My apartment was located in Kreuzberg, then a diverse community that included an abundance of public housing projects, hip pseudo-radical students and a large population of Turkish gastarbeiter and their families.  This was my first time living abroad, and I was intoxicated by the milieu.  I soon adopted a blue and white keffiyeh as part of my regular attire.  It was as much for function as form, and I continued to wear it when I returned to Canada a few years later.

Although I was particularly attentive to anything to do with die Mauer – and as a spill over, anything to do with East European politics and history – I was woefully uninformed about the politics and history of the Middle East.  I continued to wear the scarf into graduate school, more as a memory of my time in Berlin than any kind of statement about Palestinians or Israel.  So I was a bit surprised one day when a fellow student pulled me aside to inquire why I supported Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization.  We were both studying with the same graduate supervisor, who was Jewish.  I had worn the scarf during a number of interactions although it had never seemed to be an issue to our professor.

I began to understand that, willful or not, my apparel conveyed a message to others.  At first I was reactive, but then investigated the history of the Middle East and paid more attention to the then current events of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Until then I had adopted a relativist and neutral position, blaming both Palestinians and Jews for the neverending conflict and regurgitating the worn claims that a two state solution was required for lasting peace.  I even mistakenly confused who was David and who was Goliath.  The more I learned, however, the more I found my position changing.  I won’t review all the detailed points and historical references that led me to reassess my thinking.  There is an abundance of worthwhile sources that will inform those that want to become informed.  The short version is that once I understood the objective history of modern Israel and the full history of what is called Palestine, I decided to put away my keffiyeh and left it behind, materially and intellectually.  This experience also included recognizing that Edward Said and Noam Chomsky both did violence to the topic and were not only wrong but also mendacious—far worse was Ilan Pappe and his later work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.  On this point I should note that for my money, the best book on the topic is Allan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel, published twenty years ago and more relevant today than when it was written.  It offers the most clear summation of the many facts that persuaded me to put away my scarf. Despite my fond memories of Berlin, I could not wear it any longer and rejected what it stood for.

Now, so many years later, it is embarrassing how ignorant I was in my youth.  I would like to think it was an innocent ignorance rather than willful, but l also must admit that there was a convenience to the ignorance.  It was convenient to become part of the crowds of Kreuzberg, and the keffiyeh seemed an insignificant token that resonated with fond memories of my other experiences. Once I gained a better understanding of Israel, however, of its modern history and politics and the existential threats it continues to endure, and then also tracked the developments of Palestine and Yasser Arafat, through intifada, the Oslo Accords and self-government in Gaza I found it impossible not to be embarrassed by my younger self.  Or, for that matter, by the many others who willfully reside in a state of ignorance today.

Which brings us to October 7^th.  Surely the depravity of the Hamas terrorists and of all those involved in planning and carrying out such coordinated evil should give rise to a collective moral clarity as to what is going on. Israel, the sole democratic state in the Middle East, with a small population of less than 10 million people, one quarter of which are Moslem, Christian or other faiths, is (against all odds) a thriving and pluralistic society.  I have marveled not only at the many layers of history to be found in Jerusalem, but also the modernity and diversity of Tel Aviv and Haifa.  Despite the thousands of rockets bombarding Israel from Gaza and elsewhere, despite waves of suicide bombers and the clearly stated objectives of Hamas and Iran to eradicate another state, the miracle of Israel continues.

And yet we hear that somehow the “context” is critical: as if Israel has somehow brought such evil upon itself.  How can Israel be characterized as the oppressor? How can it be mischaracterized as an apartheid state, engaging in genocide against the people of Gaza?  How does any claim of genocide even carry weight given the exponential growth of the Gazan population?  And what kind of apartheid state would grant minority rights and freedoms, where Arab Israelis have their own political parties in the Knesset, and membership on the Supreme Court?  Despite this reality, the mindless regurgitation of innuendo and propaganda against Israel circulates unchecked, reinforced by passionate pleas in support for the “liberation” of Palestine.  Liberated from whom and from what?

And now this week airman Aaron Bushnell has engaged in self-immolation to protest the trope of alleged genocide and we face another tsunami of press releases from the Gaza Health Ministry and its mendacious allies concerning the slaughter of peaceful and starving Gazans storming supply trucks.

I have written earlier of the upside-down world in which we live.  Events around Israel are the greatest example today of mendacity parading about, masquerading as truth. We shouldn’t be surprised. When large swathes of the public willfully embrace the absurdity that men can have babies or seek to compel Newspeak compliance on others, that decolonization is a human rights ideology, or any number of other ridiculous claims, the schlagbaum separating sense from nonsense has been raised and all kinds of gibberish and babble not only enter our public discourse but dominate it in evil ways. Paul was prophetic in explaining to his younger colleague that the time would come when truth would be willfully repudiated and people with itchy ears would happily embrace fables foisted by fools.

In the weeks following October 7^th we witnessed the classic example of such repudiation: the erroneous story of a hospital allegedly destroyed by an Israeli strike, with 500 dead.  This piece of propaganda circumnavigated the globe numerous times before truth could even find its boots, it even overshadowed the real evil and mayhem of October 7^th.  Upon a simple review of the facts, the strike did not originate in Israel, but in Gaza itself. It did not hit a hospital, but a parking lot. And while any deaths are tragic, the number 500 was manufactured out of thin air. Despite reality, the story continued to resonate among the perpetually aggrieved, fueling additional animosity and invective against Israel.  That Israel had nothing to do with the strike did not matter, and there was no accountability for the purveyors of such propaganda.

Compare that with the verified accounts of horror inflicted by the Hamas terrorists on October 7th.  When I first heard about dozens of children and babies under the age of two being beheaded, my natural instinct was to doubt the story.  As waves of evidence followed, however, any sane human being had to recoil and yield to the moral clarity that should naturally follow. Instead of using the evidence to see things as they really are, the propaganda wars were dialed up. Demonstrations and petitions followed, passionate intensity gnashed its teeth, and here we are five months later acting as if October 7^th has nothing to do with the events of Palestine in March of 2024.

Surely in light of these events we can better understand what is underway? Those who pretend some kind of moral equivalence between Israel and Gaza or prattle on about proportionality reveal their vacuity and the hollowness of their souls. Others pretend that actual evidence does not matter and willfully replace reality with hive mind propaganda, fostering allegations manufactured to conceal, obscure and ignore the truth.  How does such mendacity resonate with so many and appeal to their desires?

One relatively minor but revealing and egregious example came from a group of self-styled American public intellectuals offering to scratch the itchy ears of the willfully ignorant.  This group of writers had earlier participated in a literature event in Gaza, and quickly felt the need to summarize the events of October 7^th in the passive voice. “After sixteen years siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza,” and “more than 1,400 Israelis were subsequently killed with over one hundred more taken hostage.”  Killed by whom?  Who planned this “break out” and why?  Why omit the depravity of the “militants” murderous Orcs?  Why not describe the evil committed?  That evil is now well documented, but has been intentionally marginalized so as not interfere with a ridiculous narrative.  And what did these scribes mean by “siege”?  Are they referencing an Israeli blockade against armaments coming into Gaza while Israel yet provided utilities and other necessities to the territory?

Why did these scribes not ask more relevant questions?  Why did Hamas and the people of Gaza not engage in regret?  Why didn’t Mr. Abbas offer to hold the terrorists accountable? Why does Hamas refuse to acknowledge the existence of Israel? A two state solution has been acceptable to Israel numerous times in the past, but never to Hamas.  And why has Hamas continually used the humanitarian aid to Gaza to fund crimes against Israel?  Why would it not release hostages without additional extortion?

Oh, I see.  These terrorists and murderers, rapists, beheaders, and hostage takers were driven to their violent rampage by an “occupation.” Let’s blame Israel. What complete nonsense. Let’s ignore that there was nothing spontaneous about these crimes; that some Gazans had been employed at the kibbutzes where the greatest slaughter was carried out and provided the information that facilitated the atrocities. These depraved crimes were funded, planned, organized, coordinated and carried out by Hamas and its supporters.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera famously wrote that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”  But how can we forget what we do not first know and understand?  Five months after October 7^th, we have access to accurate accounts of the slaughter, but as a society we still don’t seem to know very much.  Instead, the bonfires of mendacity continue to dominate the public record and consciousness.

In this light, while I find some joy in reminiscing with an old friend and being surprised at our common understanding and interpretation of the lives we have lived, I also rue our society’s collective inability to see things as they really are.  It is a tragic thing to forget important events and civic virtues, but I have come to realize that it is more tragic when we cannot discern truth.  We cannot forget what we have not first come to know. And the cacophony that follows from the confusion is a reflection of this ignorance.

Perhaps the hope I can entertain is that like my experience with the keffiyeh, we will someday understand that there is too much nonsense and that it must be put away.  I hope that day will come, and soon.  This is why October 7^th matters so much, and is not a side-bar to 2024.  Truth must be the foundation of our collective values and collective memory or we will not find the illumination we need for our future.