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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
March 7, 2002
We are not going to pretend to understand why a young man would walk into a crowd of people coming home from prayers and blow himself up. We do not have any counsel worth sharing on why a crowd of other people, living across a "green line" a few miles away, would begin celebrating when they heard the young man had killed 10 people, including several infants and boys and girls.
There is nothing in our experience as Jews that would lead us to comprehend such madness. Even when our God Himself told us to wipe out the Amalekites, the enemy who had attacked our weakest kinfolk, we couldn't do it. We place too high a value on life to be able to get inside the heads of people who are taught that it is more blessed to die a terrorist martyr than to live like a saint.
We also know, sadly, that our Jewish nation cannot sit by and do nothing in response to these barbaric acts. We wish we could counsel the leaders to stay their hands, but we cannot give that advice because we don't believe it. We know that -- no matter how careful our soldiers try to be - the retaliation will be cruel, that it will kill and maim victims just as innocent as those who died in the Beit Israel neighborhood last Saturday. We know it would be better to talk than to shoot and bomb, but we also know that the desire to talk will be misunderstood, that it will be seen as a mark of weakness and that it is most likely to bring even more of the suicide bombers into our streets.
We want, almost desperately, to believe that some third party -- the United States or Saudi Arabia -- can bring a halt to the violence by somehow forcing us and them to step away from a legacy of hate. But we know that the deaths -- more than 1,200 since Sept. 28, 2000 -- and the thousands of wounds to children and women and men have simply freshened a resolve to hate.
We would like to believe that "their" leader has some real power to turn a valve and shut off the flow of weapons to those who live for the terror they can create, but we can't even be sure that he has such a power any more or that he knows how badly he failed when he unleashed the terrorists.
We would also like to believe that "our" leader does an effective plan for protecting us, but as the violence has grown in response to almost every step he has taken, we don't see how that belief can be justified. But we don't have another solution to urge on him, so we have to accept his call for increasingly harsh action to show the other side that we are not cowed, even though we know that harshness will mean more deaths on both sides.
Those of us who live thousands of miles away cannot really understand what it must be like to go shopping, for instance, or take our children to Shabbat services knowing that a man or woman might suddenly cry out "Allah Akhbar," "God is great" in Arabic, and blow himself or herself and us to kingdom come. We can recoil in shock and horror when we see the bits of blood and bone being collected for burial, but we don't really put ourselves in that place every day, so we don't know how raw our emotions would be or how bitter we might become in demanding revenge.
We are busy mourning our own young American soldiers dying in a land 6,000 miles away as they search for the remnants of a different terrorist force, and we have only so many hours in the day to allot to tragedy.
We would like another great miracle to happen, for some force that we cannot anticipate to extinguish these flames of war. But we know that will not happen until the people on both sides agree, at the deepest level, that this madness is only that, insanity, and not a force that can accomplish anything that will make the future brighter.
Despite what some have said in recent days about how a striving for peace might actually have made peace less likely, we know that the route to laying down arms must be mapped by people and their leaders who are committed to peace above all else.
From our distance, it has long seemed that something could be done to meet the legitimate needs of both sides, that reasonable people could sit down with other reasonable people and find a common ground. But now we think that we never did understand how vile was the poison just below the surface, how high the flames of hatred had leapt. We fear they will be a long time in burning out.
While the conflagration continues, we can suggest patience and fortitude and courage and prayer. We may feel helpless, but we must never be hopeless. And we remind ourselves never to forget that those are real human beings, not demons, who are dying, on both sides.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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