Today, I’m posting a piece written by my son, Dr. Ethan Katz, Associate Professor — Jewish, Late Modern Europe, UC Berkeley, about the situation in Israel. His words express my own feelings so effectively. With appreciation to Ethan, I hope you find the following useful — please share it with others who are struggling to understand circumstances in the Middle East.

——————————–

I want my non-Jewish friends to understand some things about what is going on right now in Israel and Gaza and what your Jewish friends and neighbors need from you. What occurred last Saturday and Sunday was NOT a renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Please do not make the mistake of treating it as such. It was a brutal and vicious massacre that aimed to kill as many innocent and defenseless people as possible — women, children, the elderly, the infirm — and to kidnap many as well. Hamas murderers went from house-to-house, invaded kibbutzes and terrorized young people at an outdoor party. As many as 1000 civilians were murdered in cold blood, in the largest and most brutal and cruel massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Full stop. This is categorically different from rocket fire or attacks on military targets, or military incursions and the often terrible toll that they take on civilian life.

Many news outlets are making the mistake of acting like this is just tit-for-tat. But it is not. In the history of this conflict, we have really not seen anything like the massacre that occurred this past weekend. It was what we call in Jewish history a pogrom — an organized act of lethal violence meant to murder and terrorize Jews. For Jews and scholars of antisemitism, it unmistakably hearkens to massacres during the Crusades, or pogroms of the late nineteenth-to-mid twentieth century, or the Holocaust. These events are stunning and overwhelming for millions of Jews worldwide. Most of us either know people who have died or are one degree of separation removed from those who do. This occurred on the holiday of Simchat Torah, when we usually are celebrating completing the reading of our holiest book — the Torah — and dancing with the Torah in joyful, even delirious exuberance. Instead, we had to lean into our capacity to blend joy with shock, sorrow, and devastation as we learned about the shocking events in Israel and the way that people connected to our own communities had perished already in the first hours of this Hamas invasion.

Now, we need our friends and allies to recognize this for what it was, and to avoid false moral equivalencies. No matter how widespread, it is repugnant and indefensible to describe these massacres as “resistance” to be “celebrated” in a “freedom struggle.” It is simply shocking to realize that literally as Hamas terrorists were going house-to-house seeking to murder as many Jews as they could, often in the most vicious and brutal ways possible, and sometimes bragging before cameras about their exploits, some pro-Palestinian organizations were gathering petition signatures for statements that celebrated these Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters and rejected any critique of their actions.

And this is not because the Palestinians do not deserve freedom — surely they do. And it is not because the Israeli government’s policies are not worthy of severe and withering critique — they often are. And it is not because there is nothing to discuss about how the conditions in Gaza have developed to their current point — there certainly is in the weeks and months ahead. But because none of this changes the nature of what occurred. We are watching bodies being paraded through the streets, brutal massacres being celebrated with vile tactics that seem borrowed from ISIS and then displayed on social media without a shred of respect for human dignity. Anyone with basic decency should be ashamed to identify with the Hamas killers who carried this out and the acts they committed. And when people do so, they are dehumanizing the Jews who perished. There are those who believe these people were legitimate targets in a freedom struggle. I believe you can only see things that way if you evacuate all of the humanity from Jews and Israelis and decide that these people are biologically different evil monsters not worthy of life. Such a worldview is hateful and ultimately antisemitic.

With all that in mind, I am grateful to all those who have condemned this violence for what it is and have said that they stand with Israelis in this hour of terror and brutal devastation. It is possible to do this and simultaneously evince deep sympathy and concern for the people of Gaza as they face a major military onslaught whose impact will indeed be brutal. It is possible simultaneously to condemn unequivocally what occurred this weekend for the barbarism it was and to identify with the cause of Palestinian liberation.

But if you are silent, and you do not reach out to your Jewish friends, or you see them and you say things like “hey, how’s it going?” or “hey, did you have a good weekend?” then you are making it seem like you think nothing major happened. Like the world was not completely turned upside down. For us, it was. For Israel, this was 9/11, but with a proportionally much higher body count. We are reeling. Please try to understand where we are at.

Here is a good primer on why this time is so different.