And Yet

Living War-Adjacent

A close friend has been hounding me to attend the weekly antiwar protests. “Years from now,” she argues, “when we look back on the war, we will want to be able to tell our grandchildren that we did all we could to support the hostage families and to end the suffering in Gaza.”

Though I respect her determination and have attended protests in the past, I cannot bring myself to go now. Call it defeatism, but the protests feel futile at this late stage of the war. Hamas and the Netanyahu government, each tyrannical in its own way, are the only forces determining how and when the war will end. They do not care what we think.

And yet, my stomach coils when I see the images from Gaza. No matter how those images are being used to manipulate public opinion, no matter which version of events I believe, nor whom I hold responsible, they are stinging reminders of my adjacency to, if not complicity in, this human tragedy.

Nothing we can do now will change the war’s course. But our inescapable remove exacts a price and our powerlessness invites peril, as Ilya Kaminsky brilliantly conveys in this poem:

We Lived Happily during the War
By Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house—

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

---

“We Lived Happily during the War” appears in Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019).

I will be taking a break in August, but will be back with more A Sense of Israel in September.