Ever since the death of Bambi’s mother, I’ve known that I don’t like to watch violent or gory things. Pictures stay in my head and won’t leave.
The last couple of weeks, I’ve intentionally let my guard down. My mind is filled with terrible, bloody images. They are of Palestinian children suffering the consequences of the bombing of the Gaza Strip. “Suffering” is too weak a word.
Daughter Abigail is a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations. She is currently working in Colombia. After several years in Central America working with the poor, oppressed, and often endangered, she is acutely aware of how awful human beings can be to other human beings.
People who do her work around the world are connected, intensely and immediately, with social media. As of this writing, sixty-nine of her co-workers have been killed in Gaza. That number is likely higher when you read this.
Through Abby’s feeds, I have seen a stream of the dead and injured in Israel’s bombing campaign. The only thing comparable to the images that most of us might have seen would be that of an awful car accident. When bodies are torn apart and opened and parts severed, it is more than gruesome.
As you know, this round of violence was triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. That was appalling. An Israeli response began forthwith. We knew it was an action that would be followed by a reaction, as predictable as a sunrise.
In both action and reaction, civilians haven’t just been in the line of fire; they’ve been targets. I grew up watching war movies where soldiers lined up and charged each other. Modern warfare doesn’t offer such polite killing. A bomb isn’t as selective as a sword.
I write this in a moment of time. As of now, 1,200 Israelis were killed and 8,500 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The latter are not “numbers reported by Hamas.” They are from multiple international organizations.
Gaza has a disproportionately young population. Decades of conflict and living under Israeli siege has reduced the lifespan there. So, whatever the number dead when you read this, it will be nearly half children. I have come to tears seeing video of a child screaming in agony. Most of us would. We should.
This in no way makes excuses for October 7 and the Hamas attacks. That was despicable. But so many of the commentaries I’ve read want us to see this as black and white, or white and black. Maturity gives us the ability to see gray.
We need to know that October 7th happened in a context. UN Secretary General Antionio Guterres said that terrorism never takes place a vacuum. We are not defending the terrorists by wanting to know the history of this region. Decades of illegally taking land, bulldozing homes, and forcing Palestinians to live in armed encampments hasn’t been an effective way to avert violence.
It is not anti-Semitic to hold Israel to a standard we expect of democracies. Bombing an entire apartment building of innocents because of a possible tunnel is not right, no matter the country doing the bombing. Shutting off all resources to hospitals treating the victims of that bombing multiplies the wrongness.
It’s also likely American tax dollars paid for the bomb. That means you and I are involved. Again, welcome to a complex world.
The word “proportion” is tossed about. When there is anger and rage, we don’t think of proportion. But as awful as October 7th was, it can’t justify the slaughter of many thousands more innocent people. It is impossible to claim four thousand dead children were responsible in any way for October 7th. If there are no limits to human behavior, we are less than humans.
Many Palestinians are Christians. So even if you accept this as a blow to Muslim terrorism, it comes at the cost of many Christian lives. Jesus himself was from the Palestinian people.
It is a cycle of violence. Those are a lot easier to continue than to stop or even decelerate. A generation of young people who watch their parents and siblings massacred are more likely to succumb to the cycle than to stop it. Israel could be laying the groundwork for an attack upon that nation twenty years hence when the surviving children of Gaza are grown. Israel’s prime minister said, “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.” It will.
History doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but there are echoes. One can make an analogy between events in the Mideast and something that happened here. It is not a perfect comparison, but there are echoes of the US-Dakota War of 1862. In each, a group of men attacked innocent people in reaction to intolerable conditions. Horrible things happened.
I thought of that because of a recent article in the Journal about a speaker at a Junior Pioneer meeting. Junior Pioneer members are descendants of settlers who were here at the time of that conflict. I am a member. I am proud of my heritage. I am also not scared to see my ancestors as imperfect people, not unlike me.
The headline reports that the speaker accuses the Minnesota Historical Society and other modern historians of a “a political agenda instead of facts.” Near as I can tell, a “political agenda” is one that doesn’t match his. His talk then proceeded to be extremely political if you define that as reflecting a bias.
His primary “fact” is that a large number of white people were killed, and smaller number of Dakota were killed. If you take simply the number murdered in those few days in August 1862, that is of course true. But to present those as the “truth” is to show someone a handful of walnuts and say, “Here is a forest.”
It is a torturously inadequate understanding. According to the speaker, consequential efforts to understand the behavior of the Dakota warriors are misguided and biased against white people. Indians bad, settlers good. For decades, the US-Dakota War was called the Sioux Massacre, so there is historic precedent to that view.
Those events, like all events, occurred in a context. Good history is understanding that and growing our view instead of shrinking it. That requires depth of thought, living with complexity, and maturity.
Yes, only one hundred Dakota men were killed. But what came before and after? Beginning with the first white settlers, Natives were given two choices: become like white Europeans or go away. Finally, when the continent was taken, the descendants of all the tribes that had been here were put on reservations. They have since lived lives that are poorer, unhealthier, and shorter than whites. That’s a fact you can look up.
According to the article, the speaker received a standing ovation. If the Junior Pioneers exist solely to honor our pure and white ancestors who were victims of the savages, I will gladly rescind my membership. If our reason for being is to celebrate the defeat of the redskins as if this were some John Wayne movie, I’ll step away. Perhaps you wish to expel me. You can keep my dues.
If the Junior Pioneers are not afraid of seeking whole understanding and complete truth, the forest instead of a handful of walnuts, I’d stay.
