Humanitarian Bazaar | FIELD NOTES
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in field notes, holocaust
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FIELD NOTES | How to Advocate for Israeli Hostages Without Supporting Targeting of Gazan Civilians

October 2024  |  Humanitarianbazaar.org 

 

This past October 2024, I had a chance to revisit the Jewish neighborhood of Prague, Czechia, and join friends at a demonstration march for peace and an end to violence against civilians in the ongoing Israel-Arab regional war. Many years ago while studying creative writing at Charles University I was not only exploring the Prague of Kafka or Kundera, but also of my professor, Arnost Lustig, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, when I found listed on the walls of the Pincus Synagogue here more people with my family names than I had ever met in real life.

We only have a small bit of Jewish blood, but other names we know as Catholic were also represented there raising the question that potentially more were Jewish but had converted. As someone who was raised to know that my ancestors were not just threatened but killed each other—German vs. Jewish, English vs. Irish, whites vs Cherokee—the question stuck with me.

Over three decades, like many peers, I have been absolutely flabbergasted, mind-boggled, confused why it is so hard for the international community to call for peace on all sides, to advocate for civilians of each side of a conflict and blame fighters from any side who target civilians. Instead, people believe that if they have close family and friends who are Israeli that they must support its government unquestioningly, or if they have friends on the Palestinian side then they may accept the acts of Hamas. There is a cross-cutting approach anyone who has been on the ground can plainly see, and it is the only way out.

On October 7th, 2023, Hamas wrongfully targeted civilians in Israel, killing over a thousand innocent people and abducting people who never deserved this. And, at the same time, when Israel’s Netanyahu-Ben Gvir coalition responded, they had a right to fight for the return of hostages and prevent future attacks on civilians. But they were wrong to overreact by targeting tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, blaming them for what the Hamas gunmen had done. My point here on a quick note from the field is this:

We must embrace the complexity. We cannot let the extremists force us into a false binary in which one ethnicity is purely right and the other is purely wrong. Look close and one finds a wide, really wide variety of stakeholders on all sides, not just two. We can call for the release of the Israeli hostages, prosecution of Hamas authorities who called for the killing of civilians, the prosecution of Israeli politicians and fighters who chose to target civilians, and stop the arms dealers and settlers who wish to profit off of this war all at the same time.

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