On Israel

My son’s soccer team is, for reasons none of us can fathom, called the “Royal Rats.”  We are halfway through the fall season with the Beverly Hills AYSO, and today at La Cienega Park, the Rats bested the Killer Bees, 1-0.  After three losses and two draws, we have our first win.

I had not expected Doron, one of our two assistant coaches, to come today.  And yet, just as practice begins, he arrives, his son Eitan in tow. Eitan is also on the Rats, and where my David is stout and tall, Eitan is slight. Where my David is an increasingly reliable goalkeeper, Eitan is perhaps the fastest boy on our team.  Eitan hasn’t scored yet this season, but he’s come close.

Doron is Israeli, his accent heavy. He is secular, too – in Los Angeles, there is a main AYSO (American Youth Soccer Organization) and a secondary one, for observant Jewish families. The main AYSO league schedules games on Saturdays and plays on most Jewish holidays.  The observant league plays on Sundays, and takes off three weeks for the High Holidays, which end tomorrow night.  There are plenty of secular Jews in Beverly Hills, including a large number of Israeli expats. Doron is one of them.

I shake Doron’s hand. “How is your family?” I ask.

One should ask, on this horrible day. He looks like he hasn’t slept. His eyes are red.

“My parents are in the shelters.  My wife’s brother’s family is in Sderot. They are in their safe room.”  (Sderot is near the Gaza Strip. Hamas hit it hard today.)

I figure Doron is not a religious man, because he is in this league, and he is here and not in shul on Shabbat – and the holiday of Shemini Atzeret. I say the only thing that doesn’t seem unbearably trite. “I am glad you are here. Please let us know if we can do anything.”

Doron almost smiles.  “We can win,” he says softly.

The news from Israel broke late last night on the West Coast. I was sitting in a parking lot in Griffith Park, waiting for my daughter and her friends to finish their evening at the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride. I got a news alert on my phone, and then another and another. I opened Twitter and saw the first videos of the unspeakable.

I am not Israeli. I have been to Israel four times. My son was conceived in Tiberias and had his ritual first haircut in Tsfat. I have danced and prayed on Mt. Meron, in Shechem (Nablus) and in Hebron. I have many Israeli friends. Some are secular, and some religious. Some lean left, and some lean right. Some are Ashkenazi, some Mizrahi.  In almost all, there is something deeply practical, something deeply wise, and something deeply courageous.  Those qualities - practicality, wisdom, and courage — are born of harsh necessity. The dangers they face are monstrous, and their national character has been forged by those dangers.  For all that, they have not faced a danger and an evil like the one they faced today.

On many issues, I am an instinctive seer of both sides. I do not easily type the word “evil,” and mean it. I like ambiguity. I like complexity. I dislike stark moral binaries, because so often, those binaries erase whole categories of human experience.   Half my political arguments with my friends end up with me saying, “It’s not that simple” – and they reply, “It damn well is, Hugo.”

There is no other side here. There is no suffering so great, no injustice so profound, that it can rationalize what was done in Israel today. There is no policy so unfair that it can explain away the rapes, the murders, and the gleeful cruelties Hamas carried out this morning, and still carries out as I type these words. This wasn’t a righteous uprising of the oppressed. This was obscene, indefensible wickedness of a sort and scale that it calls into question the humanity not only of those who perpetrated it, but those who seek to justify it.

A friend of mine shared a video today of a kidnapped Israeli boy being tormented in the streets of Gaza. The frightened and confused child is perhaps seven, and a group of Palestinian boys mock him and strike him, telling him to call for his mother. “Ima, Ima, Ima!” They say.  I will not share the video.  Here is a still image.

You can find much worse online. I do not advise it, but perhaps we shouldn’t look away.

Boys in any culture sometimes need little encouragement to be cruel, but not every culture raises its sons to lose their empathy so early and so utterly. Israel does not do this. Hamas does. That is a moral divergence, and all the failures of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians cannot obviate that distinction. 

David and Eitan are a few years older than that terrified child.  David and Eitan are Jews, of course, and Hamas would treat them no better if they could get their hands on them.  My father was a very small boy when he escaped the Nazis. Many in his family were not so lucky. I do not know Doron’s family story, but I know what it has meant to be a Jew at most times and places.  We come from an ancient line of the mocked, the beaten, the raped, and the murdered.

We come from a heritage that some seventy-five years ago, said, “No more,” and created a state where Jews could be free and safe.  That safety, as we were so brutally reminded today, is too often more aspirational than real.

Yes, Israelis and Palestinians will have to live together.  Israelis know that and accept that.  Hamas does not, and it remains convinced that it can and must create a Jew-free state in what they call Greater Palestine.  Today’s bloody triumphs will only inflame their eagerness to press forward towards that dreadful goal.  Some of my  friends on the left call the Palestinian cause a movement of national liberation, and I suppose it is – if you accept anti-Semitism and genocide as foundational tenets of your freedom.

In Beverly Hills, meanwhile, it is a blazing Saturday afternoon. The Santa Anas have arrived in Southern California, and the boys are suffering in the heat, but we give them frequent water breaks and shout encouragement. “C’mon, Rats!”

The first half passes in a scoreless, frustrating draw, as does most of the second.

 And then with only a minute or so left in this tedious and sweaty fixture, it all changes. Jaden, our best midfielder, chips the ball directly into Eitan’s path. Eitan takes it at full speed, dribbling as he has not yet dribbled before, his speed increasing, past one defender, then a second; he cuts to the middle, turns back to the outside and then – improbably with his left foot, off-balance, half-falling – unleashes an absolute thunderbolt. The keeper gets a fingertip on it, but it isn’t enough, and the ball lands in the back of the net. The deadlock is broken. Eitan has his first goal at last.

The parents erupt. The boys swarm the hero of the moment. Doron covers his face with his hands, then raises two fists to the sky. “Kol Hakavod,” I say, using about a fifth of all the Hebrew I know. Well done.

Doron starts to say thank you, but it cuts off. He can’t speak for a moment. And then: “I really, really needed this.”

The whistle blows. The Rats are in the win column.  It is Eitan’s family’s turn to bring the post-game snack, and though we have been told to bring healthy treats (and we all have this season), Doron and Dorit (Eitan’s mother) have brought Krispy Kreme donuts and small pouches of fruit punch. The boys are soon high on victory and sugar.  David ruffles Eitan’s hair, and we walk to the car.

On the east field at La Cienega Park, a mostly Jewish team notched a small win today. On the other side of the globe, on this same day, the world’s only Jewish state suffered its most grievous loss in its modern history.  I am a human being, and I wish no ill to anyone in the great human family. But I am also, in the ways that matter most, a Jew. And with full heart and full throat, I support whatever must be done not only to avenge today, but to blot out the ideology that planned, executed, and celebrated it. 

It is not enough to say “Never again” without endorsing the actions necessary to ensure that “never again” is a lived reality rather than a desperate and distant aspiration.  Whatever Israel must do to ensure its safety and security it must do. That will mean moving beyond the inadequate and incomplete half-measures it has taken so far. That will mean great suffering, because we are past the point where peace and security can be achieved through nonviolence.  In this instance, nonviolence is what will come as a consequence of a decisive battle, not in place of one. For our sons, for our daughters, for our ancestors, and in the names of those we lost today, this war must be fought, it must be fought quickly, and it must be fought hard.

What can we do? I had asked Doron.

We can win, he said.

And win we will.