Two Long Years
Thoughts on a grim anniversary.
Two years ago today, members of Hamas and other militants broke into Israel and massacred nearly 1,200 people and kidnapped 250 more. Most of the victims were civilians: Grandparents tending their gardens; mothers playing with their children; young people attending a music festival. Many of the murderers reveled in the atrocities they committed, filming them and boasting about them.
Israel’s response was swift and furious, and still blazing. Gaza lays in ruins. More than 66,000 Palestinians are dead. That number doesn’t differentiate between civilians and militants, but civilian casualties are astronomical by every measure I’ve seen. According to UNICEF, more than 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or injured since the war began. Gaza’s two million Palestinians are living in abject misery.
Today is a day of profound pain and trauma. For Israelis and many Jews, it is an open wound, a day in which friends and loved ones were killed or taken. It is reminder of just how tenuous their physical safety is: Oct. 7 was the largest single-day mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, and since then, there have been repeated attacks on synagogues and on Jews simply for being Jews, often in the name of the Palestinian cause. Today is a reminder of centuries of pogroms and ethnic cleansings and being forced out of home after home; there is something particularly devastating about such a brutal attack occurring in a state that was not just a homeland, but a supposed safe haven.
For Palestinians in Gaza and the diaspora, today marks the beginning of a war that turned into a pitiless bombardment rife with war crimes, one that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocents, and has pushed a long-brutalized people desperately in need of their own state and safe haven further than ever from that dream. It has been nearly two years of a world watching, shaking its head and tut-tutting, and doing virtually nothing to stop a heinous onslaught.
You won’t see it on social media, but I suspect many of us — most of us? — can hold all of this at once: the particular horrors of Oct. 7; the protracted horrors of this war.
And I suspect many of us are asking today: what has this all been for?
