"I would have talked him out of it"
A few words about what we've come to
It may sound crazy of me, in light of recent events, to turn to a book about Star Wars for solace, but I happened to be reading Chris Kempshall’s excellent in-universe history The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire these last days. Nearing the end of the book, Kempshall, assuming the character of the historian Beaumont Kin, writes about the failures of the New Republic in the wake of the Empire’s collapse, including the violence meted out by citizens against Imperial collaborators. He references Operation: Cinder, in which planets loyal to Palpatine were razed by the Empire they’d assumed was protecting them.
“Many had supported Palpatine’s reign and quite possibly benefited from it. Should their ultimate betrayal absolve them of the guilt of having previously watched other worlds burn and yet stayed the course? There is always the temptation to give in to feelings of retaliatory violence when confronted with examples like this. To declare that these people accepted Imperial genocides, so it is only fitting that they suffer in discovering the error of their ways. But I can take no solace in mass murder. Having recently witnessed worlds and populations eradicated by the First Order, death and destruction are not justice.”
It’s a remarkable passage in a book ostensibly about a children’s space fantasy franchise. Remarkable for its moral clarity. “Death and destruction are not justice.” This is not a denial that sometimes violence is necessary, as a means of self-defense, or a means of resistance against oppression, but that violence is not justice. It can’t be.
This week, a disturbed individual got it in his mind to pick up a gun and take action against those he understood to be collaborators, complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. A righteous fury, perhaps, but misdirected, and worse. He went to an event hosted at a Jewish museum in D.C., and shot and killed two people, seemingly at random. The couple, it turned out, were employees of the Israeli embassy. In the haste of the initial reporting, I was confused as to the details of the attack, thinking the man might have deliberately targeted the embassy, a terrible act, but one whose logic I could perhaps follow. In the end, though, with further details emerging, there is simply no logic to what this person did other than an antisemitic lashing out. As a Jewish person, I find this terrifying, and as a human being I find it devastating and distressing.
Indeed, the evidence emerging is that this individual was not truly a member of the pro-Palestinian movement, which has been out on the street consistently since Oct. 7. Rather, he was an antisemite, with online Nazi-like characteristics—some have seemingly discovered that he had an “88” in his handle, for example—that many who frequent X and other unsavoury parts of the internet will recognize immediately. Whatever his politics, though, his heinous act offers all of us an opportunity to step back momentarily and think through our moral understanding of resistance.
There are those who romanticize the notion of a violent resistence, and it’s hard not to sometimes. I only just recently wrote about Andor as a valorising depiction of exactly that, though not an uncomplicated one. Something Andor communicates effectively is that violence is a soul-destroying act, sometimes justified by circumstance, but never truly just, never truly moral. Violence is nothing short of the breakdown of society, whether it’s something small like a robbery, or something huge like violent crackdowns bolstering a regime of apartheid. It cannot be moral.
Following the shooting in D.C., reporters tracked down the assailant’s address and discovered his 71-year-old neighbour, who was willing to talk. It’s an extraordinary piece of footage, and I would urge everyone to watch it. This is a beautiful, beautiful man.
Asked whether he had ever spoken to the shooter, who he decribed as “friendly,” about Palestine or Israel, he responded, “No, in fact, I regret that. I wish that I had an opportunity to talk with him, because if I had, I would have talked him out of it.”
He was also asked how he was feeling, given the news about what his neighbour had done.
“Sad, and disappointed. We have two people dead in D.C., we have 50,000 dead in Gaza, and how many children straved to death last night? In 1956, Israel invaded Sinai, they invaded Gaza. The United States president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, put his foot down. He told the French and the British, ‘Get the heck out of the Suez Canal,’ and he told Israel to get the heck out of Sinai and out of Gaza. Now, where would we be today if we had a president that could’ve said that two years ago?”
The man then revealed that he was the one with all the signs supporting a ceasefire in Gaza, and when asked what he hopes happens next, he said simply, “Ceasefire. No more deaths. No more deaths in D.C., no more deaths in Gaza.” As for his neighbour? “I don’t know,” he said solemnly, adding that he would have told his neighbour, “Guns and bombs are not going to end this genocide.”
This fact should be clear to anyone and everyone in this moment, but it is so important to reiterate wherever possible. Not as a means of castigating the left, or decrying Palestinian resistance (the question of Hamas’s role in that resistance is a whole other matter, but suffice it to say, it should be condemned, full stop), but as a way of staking out a claim on morality, and on humanity. The crimes Israel and many of its citizens have gleefully perpetrated and supported should be a clarion call, not to respond with violence in turn, but to clarify the distinction between those willing to abandon their humanity, and those for whom there is nothing more sacred.
A few days ago, Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s left-wing party Meretz and former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff, said in an interview on Israeli radio, “A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement.” For this, he came under fire from critics, Bibi Netanyahu included. Golan later clarified, “I said this morning that we are a sane country that does not kill children. When ministers in this government celebrate the death and starvation of children, we must say so. I was referring solely to the most failed government in Israel’s history — not to the IDF. Our mission is to ensure that Israel remains a sane country that does not kill children either as a hobby or as a policy.”
I might quibble with the distinction Golan draws between the IDF and the Israeli government, and, frankly, much of the Israeli citizenry, but his point is about as true as you can get. For months, Israeli media has entertained the opinions of those who say that, in fact, killing every child in Gaza is a noble mission, because they grow up to be Palestinians who hate Jews and want to eradicate Israel. One wonders how a Palestinian child would grow up to not hate Jews when such statements are made by people claiming to speak to the cause of Jewish security and Jewish values. I am not a religious person, but I do have values, and I connect those values to the experience of my own family as Jews in twentieth century Europe. I cannot comprehend the moral rot that has spread so far and wide among my own community, certainly in Israel, but outside it as well, where even when calls for the murder of children are not voiced, the justifications are just as disgusting.
Last week, I saw a video going around (in two parts) on Bluesky, in which a beligerent supporter of the genocide in Gaza confronts a kippah-wearing man at a Nakba Day solidarity demonstration outside a university in Haifa. That man, it turns out, is a lecturer on the Talmud at that very university. Among the many moral appeals he makes to this quite vile woman, the professor refers to Talmudic teachings, explaining, “Our sages knew very well that sometimes God puts us through tests. And that the tests that the Holy One, blessed be He, puts us in, we need to know how to handle.” To her uninformed references about blotting out the memory of Amalek, he responds, “And so they said: ‘There came Sennacherib and mixed up all the nations.’ You can’t know who is Amalek and who is not. That’s what’s written in the Talmud. But you prefer to listen only to the voices of evil, only to the Sitra Achra. God puts you through a test to be like the Sitra Achra, and you don’t get it.”
The woman poses the professor the question, what is then the lesson of Oct. 7? “The lesson of October 7,” he tells her, “was that low-intensity war is impossible. Low-intensity war eventually spreads and explodes as a high-intensity war, and therefore the alternative to low-intensity war is not to continue low-intensity war. And the alternative to high-intensity war is not low-intensity war.”
Appeals to holy texts are not, generally speaking, my bag, but here is a man who locates in his faith an undying humanity that we must all be diligent to never lose. That we may look at our troubles, the horrors we witness and experience at the hands of other people, and refuse to allow our humanity to slip away as a result. So, so many have been failing this crucial test. The shooter in D.C. failed this test. His neighbour has not. “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s right there, Leviticus 19:18. I may be an atheist, but on that one, I think the Jews had it right long ago. Would that we all lived up to such a beautiful aspiration.