Stuck

We are all naturally attuned to and therefore familiar with cyclicalities. Day gives way to night until the sun rises again, the moon repeatedly journeys around the earth, the tides’ continuous ebb and flow, the magnetic poles, and so on. And it’s not just nature – business has its cycles, fashion, wealth, empires, moods, etc.

There is a sense in which cycles that exist in nature and those created by human life differ insofar as the former are circular while the latter turn like flotsam in a gyre never returning to the same place. But that is only a delusion. Natural cycles only appear two-dimensional from our fixed vantage or by a forced smoothing of the data. No season ever comes back the same. The moon is always getting further away from the earth and the magnetic poles are not at ±90° latitude.

Across cultures, linguistic and religious communities, this cyclicality has been imbued with a certain level of agency or intentionality. Mandarin – If you plant gourd, you get gourd; if you plant beans, you get beans. Hindi – Do good, have good. Hebrew (Tanakh) – For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Arabic (Quran) – No one will reap except what they sow.

Watching the violence emanating from the “Holy Land” and its festering across the globe I am amazed by our collective failure to exercise the most basic acumen to break out and away from the cycle of violence.

Hamas, rising up from among Palestinians who are living under brutally inhumane conditions created and perpetuated by the Israeli State, lashed out in violence against Israelis. In turn, Israel’s government lashed out, and continues to lash out, against Palestinians.

Neither sees that they are, and have been, saying the same thing about the other. Neither sees the horror each has been and is continuing to inflict on the other.

Both need to be restrained by those of us who are not so directly threatened to have to choose between fight or flight. Instead, the so called leaders of the “free world” rushed to the side of Israel’s present leadership to push them to act on their worst instincts.

The Israelis called 10/7 their own 9/11. And it is. The US military bombed 300,000 innocent Iraqis to death in response because their brutal dictator was alleged to harbor WMDs and they collectively hate us for our freedom. The US military then killed 70,000 Afghan civilians because it turned out to be them who hated us for our freedom; WMDs were no longer relevant. Iraq is a total mess and Afghanistan is back under the Taliban. Lessons learned. Until they weren’t.

What does the “free world” expect the outcome to be of the murder of thousands of Palestinians? What does the “free world” expect from the tens of thousands among them that survive with burns, missing limbs and organs, homeless, destitute or orphaned. What does the “free world” think will be the mindset of those who have been traumatized by weeks of pulling siblings, parents and in some cases their entire families’ corpses out from underneath the rubble.

Will the Palestinians “Never Forget”?

Rather than be jolted into rethinking our approach when confronted with another set of “deplorables” calling for freedom for Palestinians, the free world’s political and business leaders are tripping over each other to blitzkrieg those voices into silence through shaming, doxing, censure and ostracism.

Rather than take pause when we see Jews storming congress or filling Grand Central Station in protest over the US suborned massacre of the Palestinians, we dismiss them as traitors and object to cease-fires. Rather than realize our instincts for revenge have gotten the better of us when a holocaust survivor stands with the Palestinian people we question their sanity and accuse them of antisemitism.

Those who love Israel owe Israel better. Crossing the seas to fan the flames of war by sowing the wind, it is not they who will reap the whirlwind – it is Israel. The blood on their hands is Israeli and Palestinian since 1917.