Humor? At a Time Like This?
The knot in the pit of my stomach hasn’t fully uncurled in months. I’m tired of crying. So, as I often do, I turn to humor to create a tiny breach in the darkness. I have serious things to say on the topic, too, but they’ll wait.
So, in the hopes of bringing you a brief smile amidst the pain, here are my top five absolutely not serious solutions to the catastrophic situation in Israel/Palestine.
- Elon Musk terraforms Mars. It becomes either New Palestine or New Israel. We’ll flip a coin to determine which. (I’m sure Musk will refer to it as “X” either way.) The commute will be a real pain in the posterior, though. Maybe he can create an outer-space hyperloop too.
- The USA gives Southern California to the Jews. Hollywood is already full of our people, and the climate is similar to the Mediterranean. You’ll like it here. Maybe we can get Mexico to throw in the Baja peninsula as a bonus. Whale-watching, anyone?
- Disney buys Israel/Palestine and turns it into a giant theme park. No one is allowed to live there, but the descendants of Abraham (that’s Israelis and Palestinians, folks) get free admission and unlimited rides on the Holy Roller Coaster. I’m sure all the Israelis and Palestinians will be just as pissed off as before, but no longer at each other. That’s progress, right? (Alternately: Jeff Bezos buys the entire region and turns it into the world’s biggest Amazon distribution center. Everyone will be gainfully employed, and also too exhausted from working in the warehouses to fight anymore.)
- Add Ativan to the region’s water supply. Preferably along with some CBD, THC, and maybe a little LSD or some shrooms. Let’s get everyone too relaxed to fight. I’d suggest opiates, too, for maximum chill, but coming down off of them is a real bear.
- Aliens. Alien invasions solve everything. We need an “Independence Day” scenario, where everyone has to team up against an enormous external threat in order to survive. We seem to be a little short on actual extra-terrestrial invaders at the moment, so maybe some of the aforementioned gazillionaires can arrange for a convincing fake. I suspect any actual aliens want nothing to do with the hot mess that is planet Earth, at least while it’s still under human jurisdiction. Our species seems to have a knack for screwing everything up.
…Seriously, though, I wish for nothing more than peace in the Middle East. For everyone.
***
And to my fellow Americans, a plea: Let’s not let anger and hatred and grief and fear rule how we respond to the news from abroad. People, normal human people like you and me, are suffering right now. When we focus on choosing a side, or on determining who is Right or Wrong, we lose sight of their humanity, and our own.
The hardest (and most important) thing for those of us outside the war zone is to not lash out at each other. Please, do your best to listen to people whose perspective is different from your own, without assuming this makes them your enemy. There are many uncomfortable facts on both sides of this story, and I ask you to try and face them with humility rather than resistance. It’s not easy.
Try to approach discussions with a willingness to learn something, willingness to challenge your own assumptions, and willingness to be wrong sometimes. Try to accept that there is much uncertainty, and many contradictory truths. Moral ambiguity is not a concept our culture handles easily — it makes us deeply uncomfortable. Be aware of how that discomfort affects you and try not to let it control you. Screaming at each other does nothing to make anyone safer or protect anyone’s human rights.
Let’s become peacemakers amongst ourselves. The world needs peacemakers right now.
I leave you with a list of some of the articles that have been helping me retain my faith in humanity lately:
“Rami and Bassam met at a Combatants for Peace gathering, an Israeli-Palestinian movement of ex-fighters committed to non-violence. Rami’s daughter, Smadar, had been killed in a suicide bombing attack in the late 1990s in Jerusalem. A decade later, Bassam faced the same devastation when his ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was killed by an Israeli rubber bullet near her school.”
“I envision myself not as an Israeli crying at home over what his people are going through, but as one of the Hamas terrorists: if I had been born there, I would likely have committed the very acts I cried over this week.”
“This is our darkest hour, for me, for my children and for my loved ones. We, Israelis and Palestinians who believe in a shared equal society are grieving, we are violently attacked by the warmongers on both sides, and we are rejected by our international allies for not turning our backs against each other. We need your help, not through short-sighted one-sided empathy, but through sincere, stubborn and hopeful compassion.”
“I think of the Palestinians and Israelis whom I have worked with for years — educators, community leaders, artists, high school and university students — who showed themselves to be uncommonly courageous: they dared to imagine a future different from what we see around us now. Together we lived “as life could be.”
“What if we taught how countries become powerful and what it actually took? How many lives were destroyed in the process of making something great, and that it should be a source of national shame and not national pride?”
“Israeli activists have been advocating for decades that our future, our safety, our freedom, is tied with that of the Palestinians. That it’s not a zero sum game — it’s the opposite. That we live together or die together. That it’s not us against them — it’s war mongers and corrupt politicians against the rest of us. Against the people. Us killing and hating each other won’t make us safer or better off.”
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