Evening loves. 🕊️
Today's deep-dive is heavy, and still related to the war.
When I wrote my four-parter on Israel and the West earlier this year, I tried to dispel Western ideas that keep getting imposed on Israel, instead of listening to Israel's democratic society.
That issue has come to the fore again.
So, today I contrast Bush after 9/11 with Netanyahu leading up to and after October 7: to remind folks that democracy is complicated, and *always* a casualty of war.
@MLClark Wow. Again, blown away by your work. Massive gratitude. I didnt say last time how surprised I was that you seemed to have jumped inside my head, heard all my questions, and turned them into thoughtful answers.
🙏
Oh I'm so glad. Thank you for this.
I didn't include it here, but Pres. Herzog had an interaction that reminded me just how hard this is for everyone. He blamed civilians, then backtracked when a journalist pressed... and it hit me then that so many aren't allowed any grace for saying horrible things when they're raw with trauma. It's on record that he said something awful, when no one's had time to grieve properly. We need to have so much grace while holding a humanitarian line.
(The journalist did right, by the way. Pressing, allowing for him to recover. But so often we leap to gotchas and then condemn a person for what they say while hurting. We can and must correct the dehumanizing rhetoric itself, while not leaping to dehumanizing the traumatized people who fall into it in their grief. A complicated concept, but important.)