from current issue of Soundings East

A Large Gray Area
Richard Hoffman

My friend, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, is singing to me. We’re in my study and across from me, in the other chair, he is singing a song he loves in Arabic. He has a beautiful voice and it’s clear to me that he enjoys singing. When I praise and thank him, he tells me the song is centuries old. Then he touches my guitar propped on its stand and says, “And now. Please.” He smiles broadly. It is a lopsided trade, my version of The Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” for Mosab’s exquisite Arabic lyric sung a capella, a melody ancient and ensouled in him, but I give it my best.

Mosab was headlining the 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem Massachusetts and staying with my wife and I for a couple of days. His first book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear had won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press’s Derek Walcott Poetry Prize. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The book is a beautiful bildungsroman of sorts, its poems bearing witness to the Palestinian spirit of survival. I painted him a picture of a fish in the colors of the Palestinian flag, in honor of his poem, “The Fish and the Refugee Camp.”

We have been friends since October of 2019. Mosab had come from Gaza to the U.S., through a tangled and frustrating and dangerous process, by a consortium, Scholars-at-Risk, with whom I volunteered, representing both PEN New England, and the college where I taught. We met at a party to welcome and celebrate Mosab and a young Nigerian writer the group had also aided in fleeing his perilous situation. Mosab looked overwhelmed; he and his family had just arrived from the airport after a long flight. I was introduced to his wife Maram and their two little ones. Often we’d meet at the public library after that, and we would work on his poems and the stories he was also writing back then. I don’t know if I was much help to him, but for me it was the beginning of a deepening friendship and an education that has continued, painfully, through these tragic days.

He taught me a few Arabic words. My pronunciation was awful. I learned from him how to drink my tea with sage. I learned from him, and from his poems, that life in Gaza exists on a vertical axis of generations, a way of understanding time that’s been all but lost in the west, where time —its wingéd chariot hurrying near, creating fear — is mostly horizontal, where time is money. He introduced me to the work of Palestinian writers like Ghassan Khanafani and Elias Khoury. He put me in touch with poet, professor, and essayist Ammiel Alcalay. And he opened my eyes to life in occupied Gaza.

In 2022, Mosab, Maram and the children returned to Gaza. The prospect of the children losing their language and culture and their family connections was unacceptable, and there was work to be done, centered on the library Mosab had founded in Beit Lahia.

Anyone who cared to could learn from Mosab how to be angry without malice, how to be righteous without self-righteousness. When he was in eighth grade, Israel bombarded Gaza killing nearly 800 civilians, 300 of them children, and Mosab was wounded. He still carries shrapnel in his body.

After the poetry festival, Mosab returned to Gaza, to Maram and their — now three — children, to his large family of brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. He sent me a photo of my fish painting propped on a bookshelf. “I want you to come here some day,” he wrote, “and see the library.”

Mosab founded The Edward Said Library, the first English language library in Gaza in 2014, just after the Israeli assault known as “Operation Protective Edge” left 2200 Gazans dead, including 600 children. The library’s collection was comprised of book donations from the US, Canada, and Europe. It soon became a cultural oasis, offering English classes, arts and crafts for kids, readings, musical evenings. Of course it is now rubble like everything else in Gaza, dust and twisted rebar and chunks of concrete.

After the October 7th uprising by Hamas, when Gaza once again came under bombardment, when the death toll rose higher and higher like the shrieking of an ignored teakettle, with Mosab and his family in Beit Lahia, and then in the Jabalia camp, and then evacuating to the south, the Israeli onslaught became very personal: we worried for their safety. We tried to keep in touch. Once in a while Mosab managed to text. “Still alive. Someone help us!”

2.

Immediately after October 7th, a friend and colleague, a writer I have long admired, posted the Israeli flag on his Facebook page, along with a challenge to all those who were standing with Ukraine against Russia’s aggression: change your profile pic to an Israeli flag or show yourself to be a hypocrite and antisemite. I wasn’t shocked that his initial response was so passionate; much of his work explores his Jewish identity and its collisions with antisemitism. At the same time, it smacked of a kind of manipulation, and I felt bullied.

Maybe this is what always happens when a war begins. Friends fall out over differences. Many of my Jewish friends felt threatened, and they had not only their own reawakened holocaust trauma to deal with, but newly emboldened Nazis (“Jews will not replace us!”) October 7th was repeatedly described as a pogrom.

And right there, for the rest of us, was the sticking point: how could anyone but a Nazi not want to stop a pogrom? Whose conscience, historically aware, could fail to be stirred by such violence and hatred directed at Jews, many of whom, it’s been pointed out, were progressives who wanted nothing but peace with Palestinians?

But historical pogroms targeted people for being Jews, not for having driven people from their homes and stolen their livelihoods and land. The refusal to acknowledge this distinction conflates criticism of Israel’s conduct with antisemitism. It is a conflation that vast amounts of propaganda endeavor to preserve. One definition of anti-semitism holds that it is antisemitic to hold Israel to a standard not applied to other democratic nations. That sounds reasonable, but what possible standards might be used to set that bar? Sand Creek? Wounded Knee? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Iraq? Afghanistan?

It’s worth reviewing the history since the media continue to promote the lie that this war began with an unprovoked assault on Israel. These facts are widely available, but worth including here. Israel has been bombing Gaza regularly since 2006, the year after they withdrew their occupying troops.

Let’s set aside The Nakba, when the grandparents of the current adult population of Palestine were, all 700,000 of them, forcefully driven from their homes, killing some 15,000 of them and razing more than 500 towns and villages. Let’s look at the violence after their forced relocation to Gaza. In 2008-9, “Operation Cast Lead” killed 1,387 Palestinians, 773 of them civilians, including 320 children. (These are the attacks that Mosab survived when he was in the 8th grade.) In 2012, “Operation Pillar of Cloud” killed 167 Palestinians. 2014’s “Operation Protective Edge” left 2200 Gazans dead, including 600 children. And then the attacks on Gaza of 2021: 200 casualties, 70 of them children.

So when people ask me, “What do you think the U.S. would do if Canada came across the border and killed 1200 Americans and took 300 hostages?” I know they are speaking from inside the narrative that denies any of the attacks on Gaza by Israel I’ve just listed. Some of them are simply ignorant, depending for news on outlets that have loyalties beyond loyalty to the truth. Others are doubling down on that story like a child with his fingers in his ears, shaking their heads at what they refuse to believe can be true.

What shall we call these periodic bombardments? These murders of children? These massacres? Netanyahu called them “mowing the grass.”

If you want to be on a side, if you must be on a side, be on the side of the children subjected to unimaginable horror. James Baldwin, as usual, puts it clearly: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” William Blake said it even more succinctly: “The angel who presided at my birth/Said little creature, formed of joy & mirth/Go. Love without the help of anything on earth.”

The multinational gangsters we call leaders, who will stop at nothing to win territory, wealth, and power, can depend on the post-traumatic responses of people who have been injured by history, by war, by injustice. That is the true “cycle of violence,” the cycle of vengeance that whirs like a power plant, fueling the ambitions of oligarchs. War, not chess, is the real game of kings. The manipulation of human beings and their passions, turning grief into rage, fear into hatred, is the way the game is played. That is even more true now with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda of all colors and shades and tones instantly communicated nearly everywhere.

More and more of us have become “incapable of morality” caught in the gladiatorial binary that is, itself, a savage mirage: wars conducted by nation states are about conquest, territory, riches and resources, no matter what myth, secular or religious, is cited to justify them, no matter what propaganda undergirds them. I do not believe it is antisemitic to point out that as human beings one of the things we all have in common — alas! — is a proclivity to self-aggrandizing myths which allow for the mass murder of others.

War insists on a morality beyond morality, made of colored cloth, noble words, and sacralized weapons, a morality that supersedes that of civilized people. But such a morality cannot be moral if it just spreads death everywhere making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, or even between fighters and civilians, or even between adults and children.

If this war morality that transcends peace morality allows someone to deliberately kill a child, then it is no morality at all. What should we call it? A self-ratifying con game? A religious delusion? A psychotic break?

Some shrug off continuing savagery and cruelty by saying, “That’s just the nature of war” — as if war has anything natural about it, or as if war really is a kind of supernatural force: Mars or Ares presiding, exonerating the human war makers and profiteers. Worse is the idea that rape, destruction, and murder are human nature, that violence and bloodlust, because they have existed throughout history are thereby indispensable features of our species. Of course, if you believe that, then there is no such thing as innocence, only youth and foolishness. And if we embrace that view, then there’s no reason, other than a cringeworthy sentimentality, not to murder children if they are seen as obstacles or necessary sacrifices. Iphigenia must be sacrificed to sack Troy. Abraham’s willingness to murder his own son, Isaac, gains him the conquest of Canaan.

If there is no such thing as innocence, then talk of morality is just talk, cynicism is added to despair, and the killing of children continues, despite our “thoughts and prayers.” Even before we tally the traumatic consequences of war, upwards of 40% of immediate civilian casualties in the techno-industrial combat of a modern war are children. War is an assault on the future. All wars are wars against children.

“I understand the universality of sin,” says Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “I understand the universality of retribution, but children have no part in this universal sin, and if it’s true that they are stained with the sins of their fathers, then, of course, that’s a truth not of this world, and I don’t understand it…. I want forgiveness, I want to embrace everyone, I want peace. But if the suffering of children is required to make up the total suffering necessary to arrive at that peace, then I say here and now that it can never be worth such a price.”

If all wars are wars against children, then they are also wars against our own innocence, our own essence: when we cease believing in innocence, we give up on our own moral agency and become powerless, despairing, numb. I know I’m not saying anything new. I’m saying something very old: that beyond war, that even beyond genocide, there is the awful spreading consequence of humanicide, the death of our humanity, the collapse into hopelessness, the hardening of our hearts, the desiccation of our souls.

Look at the pictures of Gaza and tell me a story about soldiers on a battlefield, about heroism, about defending one’s home, about making every effort to spare civilians. I have friends who, confronted with this history, this list of atrocities, insist things aren’t all black and white, that “there is a large gray area.” Yeah, there is, it’s a landscape of ashes, a large gray area called Gaza.

3.

In November of 2023, as he and his family fled south to the Rafah crossing, Mosab was separated from Maram and the children, abducted and beaten by Israeli Defense Forces. Later he chronicled this in the first of a series of essays for The New Yorker, a series that would go on to win the Overseas Press Club’s Flora Lewis Award. All that time, we were beside ourselves with panic, and along with many, many others, I called, emailed, texted everyone I knew who might be able to help, or who might know someone who could.

After his release, he was somehow able to find his family, and later they crossed into Egypt. Almost immediately he saw the needs of the refugee community there, and he asked me to send him books and syllabi for a poetry class he’d be teaching. After a time he and his family made it to the U.S. where he’d been offered a teaching fellowship.

And now, during “phase one” of a ceasefire, Donald Trump has announced that the United States will drive Palestinians from Gaza, “level it,” and build “the Riviera of the Middle East” there — with the 2 billion dollars Saudi Arabia gave to Jared Kushner at the close of the first Trump administration? How is the displacement of Palestinians, both in the Nakba and now, different from the displacement of Poles, Czechs, and others via the doctrine of “Lebensraum?” How is it different from Manifest Destiny? The Louisiana Purchase? The Trail of Tears? Ask the Cherokee about “voluntary relocation.”

At least the Israeli government is not being held to a different standard.

Just as the narrative that this war began on October 7th 2023 is false, so is the story that it is Netanyahu and his right wing government who are perpetrating this genocide on the Palestinian people. For a good while it has seemed clear to me that this slaughter and forced removal has been directed from Washington, with our Secretary of State flying back and forth several times for talks, talks about exchanging intel, logistical support, and providing further weapons. Our new president shocked everyone with his comments about the United States taking over Gaza, but I think for many in the State Department and intelligence services, the shock was that he gave away the game, he said the quiet part out loud. He has never been any good at handling classified information. It’s nearly impossible now to believe that the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Gaza was not the plan all along. After all, those are American missiles and bombs landing almost daily on schools, hospitals, and even tent encampments. Biden’s repeated pleas to Netanyahu were merely gestures, stunts to help sustain and reinforce this inverted narrative; even the building of a floating dock to deliver aid was little but a cynical performance. The total aid delivered from that pier amounted to two days worth of assistance to Gaza, fewer than 600 trucks. At a press conference on July 11, President Biden said he was disappointed with the failures in providing aid through the floating pier.

The rhetoric from Israel now, in “phase 1” of the ceasefire, is all about the difficulty of restraint: the dogs are all straining at the leash, up on their hind legs, pawing the air and growling. Palestinians are returning to the ashes of their homes to dig the decayed corpses of family and neighbors from beneath the rubble. The rationale for ending the ceasefire and resuming the war is being prepared.

I feel helpless, useless. My grandchildren, Damion, Emory, Savannah, Nicholas, and Olivia are bright, healthy, beautiful, and innocent. Damion, Emory, and Savannah are Black, Nicholas and Olivia white. They are young children, and it’s likely that by the time they are old enough to ask the awful question I feel sure they will have for me, I will be gone, so I am trying to answer it now. It would be a sentimental dodge and a moral failing to spend time with my grandchildren and feel the joy they bring me so effortlessly, without asking why they will likely come of age in such a diminished and compromised world. To frame the question just a little differently, just a bit more personally: Why did their grandfather feel that surveying the myriad wrongs, excuses, silences, and failures of militarized capitalism was all he needed to do? And how did that come to be the case, it seems, for an entire generation, especially one that in its youth seemed hell-bent on revolution? How did we become so damned helpless? How did we become spectators?

I think that until we have a wholesale commitment to a warless future, beginning with making children’s welfare the first priority, we will never escape the ravages of ongoing and repeating historical traumas. We need a world parliament of peace that makes binding decisions, something like what the UN was meant to be. We need an International Court of Justice recognized by all nations. Or maybe we need a world parliament of mothers-of-toddlers. They seem to know how to resolve disputes better than anyone else: “You give that back, right now!” “I said, ‘Say you’re sorry’ or you get a time-out.” “Use your words!”

Mosab continues to use his words; a new book, Forest of Noise, has just come out from Knopf. He continues to speak out with new essays, poems, and guest appearances on radio and television where he can speak on behalf of the unimaginable suffering of the Palestinian people. He has become a source of information and testimony from within Gaza. I sometimes hesitate to circulate the images that Mosab transmits from his friends and family still in Gaza, the scenes are so gruesome, even viewing them is traumatic. I have sometimes felt injured by them in a way I can’t explain. I tell myself it is my duty to look, that to bear witness is to bear the visceral impact of the photographs. That to turn away makes me complicit somehow, even beyond my already compromised status as an American taxpayer. But I think I look because they awaken the grief and rage in me and because the alternative is to deceive myself about the world.

Not long ago, just after I’d watched a brief video of a child lifted in someone’s arms, her body limp, her brain flopping from her broken skull, my granddaughter, five, burst through the backdoor to greet me. “Grandpa!”

I hugged her tightly. I held her for dear life. I held her a bit too long before I let her go.

“Grandpa? Are you crying?”