The antagonist to peace isn’t war, it’s hate

Where does the love come in?

I wasn’t sure what today’s piece would be about until five minutes before I started writing it. There are a couple of topics swirling around in my mind, they are now all in my notes folder for future blogs. But for today, I can’t go past the war and the current attack on Israel by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A quick scan of social media landed me on a feed of a guy I’ve been following for the last six months. His posts are real, informative and compassionate. He isn’t one to point a finger of blame unless it’s fully warranted. Popping out of the screen was a live video of a ‘ceasefire now’ protest in Canada. The protest was interrupted by a man on loud speaker exclaiming that Iran had begun attacking Israel. The crowd broke out in applause. I repeat, the crowd broke out in applause.

That was the moment my piece for today was decided.

You cannot ask for ceasefires that are one-sided. You cannot ask for ceasefires that discern between who is sending the rockets, missiles or drones. You cannot ask for ceasefires that are not about peace.

If you call for a ceasefire then you will always call for a ceasefire. And if you don’t then it’s not about peace, it’s about something entirely else.

This one clip visually summed up everything I’ve been feeling for six months. The questions circulating are constant. Has the world truly gone crazy? Is the world that blind to see that the very thing that gives us freedom of speech and democratic right to protest is at risk? Has the world not seen what happened in Iran when the new leadership regime took over, and what is still happening?

Is it worth risking that all just out of Jew hatred (sometimes masked as Zionist hatred)? Or some conspiracy theory that the Jewish people and the ‘colonialist zionist state’ rule the world? Really it all boils down to this because right now a vote for Iran is a vote for a global caliphate of Islamic Jihad extremism and a world none of us really wish to contemplate, let alone live.

If anyone is cheering Iran on for attacking Israel, they are not people who are about ceasefires. Or they are very ignorant and need to learn more about the cause they are advocating for.

Writing about the impact of politics is new for me, I was told once by an astrologist some 25 years ago that this would happen for me at some point. Well, by damn, she was right. But my drive for it isn’t coming from my head, rather it’s rising from my heart. As I realised the only way to heal what is happening in the world is via the heart, but not a false trendy social activist heart that so many have been putting on these last six months.

I guess my heart beckoned on the 7th of October and it hasn’t stopped beckoning since.

I often see in my vision the masked faces of the terrorist militants that invaded the kibbutzim and the Nova Festival that morning and I see the bloodied, charred and mutilated bodies. Those images are now etched in my psyche. Every single one of them could’ve been me if I lived in Israel. And every single one of them was me because each bullet, each grenade, each knife, each rape was not against the individual people, but against a peoplehood.

The attack on Israel on 7 October was never about land. It was always an ideological fight, culture against culture, civilisation against civilisation. Not that I suggest you do it because the 45 minute video of the day’s events has left people I know in therapy, but there was one clear resonating message from those who did watch it. Upon stabbing or torturing or raping the Israelis, there was never a shout for ‘yes we get land back now’. Gaza or the West Bank or Jerusalem or any other landmark was never mentioned. It was always a cry of Allahu Akbar.

And now with this strike at Israel, Iran is admitting what we’ve known for a long time, that Hamas is an Iranian terror proxy as are the Houthis and Hezbollah and other militant groups. Hamas is not a handful of poor freedom fighters in flip flops as someone quoted in a presentation I went to recently.

Honestly, if anyone took the time to do their math and use logic, every threat and narrative out there would be rebuffed. But trauma doesn’t work that way. It works from wounding. At least, the Jewish people are honest enough to admit our trauma, what plays into our responses and basically what makes me want to triple check the lock on my door at night since the 7th of October.

‘Ceasefire now’ protests are not about ending war because Israel and Gaza war isn’t the only one happening now, but it’s the only one spoken about. What about Congo, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan? And where are the boycotts to Russian or Pakistanian products?

Why don’t you hear about this on social media?

Because they don’t play into identity politics. They don’t fit into the new binary world narrative of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’. Coloured people can’t be classified as an oppressor so the stoning of women in Iran ‘by their own’ just doesn’t fit into white politics story so it’s not really newsworthy.

And, they aren’t about Jews.

There is a whole movement of millennials claiming resistance as cool, violence as acceptable and threats to make Jewish people feel culturally unsafe just part of the play.

I’m tired now. Tired of preparing each day for the influx of lies, propaganda and attack. Tired of seeing Israel and the Jewish people earmarked as the dumping ground for every problem in the world; a country half of the size of Tasmania and a population of people that make up 0.2% of the entire global population.

Tired of feeling like I have to defend, guard, protect, fend off because as Marianne Williamson wrote in her latest substack:

“We feel very little permission to express ourselves when others feel they have the right to tell us our history and tell us what our history means. To be a Jew today is for many of us to feel shut down. And it makes us feel frightened, as well. For many of the counterfeit narratives being thrown around today are the most ancient, dangerous and libelous antisemitic tropes.”

On Monday I held a circle for women in my community. It was a safe space. Room where we could share without judgement, to be seen, witnessed, heard without ‘what-aboutisms’ or needing to justify our existence. I actually could exhale, I can’t do that much these days. There is a part of me always on guard, wondering what the other is thinking about me, my people or a country which is part of my lineage and homes members of my extended family.

Many people say to me they don’t have the time to learn about the war or don’t want to get into politics. And to an extent, I agree. I’ve never been one for that either, until it really hit me at my core.

But where we as women have a role is to sniff out things that are blatantly wrong. We can use our intuition to feel into narratives that just simply don’t make sense.

So I thought what can I do for those who don’t have time or desire to gather research on this war but are intellectually inclined.

I can ask some questions. And leave it with you to reflect on. So here is a start…

• How can it be OK that a photo taken by a man of a woman’s raped, mutilated and murdered body, being spat on and cheered on by crowds, could win an esteemed photojournalism prize? The first time ever a photo of a deceased corpse had been awarded a prize.

• How can it be even fathomable with all the chaos in Gaza that a list of every single child killed is not only available but now printed on huge posters displayed at Pro-Palestine events around the world? This kind of information usually takes years after a war to gather and confirm. For the Holocaust it was decades.

• How can any woman, any woman, agree on the weaponising of rape as resistance?

• How can there be a genocide or ethnic cleansing on Palestinians if the population has steadily increased, in Gaza alone 1.034% since 1950?

• How can there be apartheid in Israel if the majority is in rule (apartheid requires a minority to be ruling over a majority) and there are 2 million Arab Israeli citizens?

• If Jewish people aren’t indigenous to Israel, then why is the earliest reference of the name Israel dating back to the 13th century, the Hebrew language spoken today the same that is written in the bible and Ashkenazi Jews traced back to a population living between the river and the sea before the Roman exile?

• How many reading this realise that 80% of the Israeli population is coloured/mix race?

And for those who are more emotionally inclined, I want to leave you with something I’ve been pondering myself.

If we were all really just about peace, this is how it would go…

We would say that the whole bloody thing is horrific and we’d stop there.

No what-aboutisms. No identity politics. No intersectionality. No conflation of issues. No making Israel the dumping ground of all the world’s rubbish and people’s personal projections, guilt and shame. Nothing else other than the facts. No comments. What if a post went up on a tragedy and there were no comments? Just a whole lot of crying hearts…

Maybe if we all just felt this. Truly felt this. The pain, the suffering, the darkness, the death, the inhumanity of it ALL, something would shift then.

We’d cry for days. Maybe years. Is that what we’re really frightened of? The true depth of our emotion. Our pain.

But in it we’d find a place where we are all the same. Here is where the love will come in.

For six months I’ve wondered this quietly and now I will wonder it out aloud. These platforms are numbing us, time spent on keyboards as warriors is desensitising us; with no touch, no contact we risk forgetting our humanity. Our nervous systems are frying and fraying. And we risk losing connection with our souls.

War on battlefields isn’t new. But this is. And this is what we all have the power to stop.

And maybe just maybe our love would do the healing. If all the bloody energy going into keyboard hate and protests went into feeling.

There is only so much energy we have, how are we going to use it?

I believe the antagonist to peace isn’t war. It’s hate. And until we drive out the hate and surpass it with love, there will be no peace. Until then no ‘ceasefire now’ chant will change anything.

With love,

Sharon