Good Germans

Many politically outspoken friends and acquaintances have stayed silent on the genocide in Gaza. While I understand the fear that motivates them and am furious at those terrorizing them, history may not judge them as kindly.

When I was in, I think, 8th grade, I had a substitute science teacher that I will never forget. Science was a subject I struggled with, and I tended to zone out during lectures having anything to do with organic compounds or sub-atomic particles or Gregor Mendel lovingly tending his peas. The one excitement in those years was during the finals for Integrated Physical Sciences class, when each two-person team had to determine the unique contents of a beaker of mystery fluid by using boiling points and chemical reactions and the like, and Sue Blazek defied orders not to eat the potentially poisonous residue in order to successfully determine one of her components was citric acid. There was one electric moment when we all thought she might fall down dead on the linoleum floor while still wearing her lab goggles.

So I expected more of the same formulaic boredom, interspersed with the usual sub teacher pranks, when a petite woman walked into the classroom one day and announced she’d be in charge as Mr. Roberts was out sick. Instead, she quietly began to tell us about her incarceration in a Japanese internment camp in California during World War II. I stopped doodling with my turquoise felt tip in my graph-paper notebook and listened with growing outrage to a story I’d never heard before, despite having had to sit through Night and Fog, cast with a clackety Bell and Howell film projector onto a roller blind screen, earlier in the year. My response was the same in both cases: How did this happen while we looked away?

A couple of months later, the same teacher came to the same classroom and I steeled myself once more for some chatter about science-y things I neither understood nor cared to. (It was only in my sophomore year, when grades started to count for college, that I stayed after school to force myself to learn chemistry with the help of the heroically kind and patient Mr. Bok.) Again, I was surprised, as she shared the very same story she’d recounted on her previous visit, just as quietly and steadily to just as silent an audience. Had she forgotten she’d already told this particular class of this particularly awful experience?

Bearing Witness

It was only by her third appearance that year that I began to understand: She was never going to teach us science. This was her mission and this was the story she would repeat and repeat until the whole world knew it. I found this subversion thrilling. Any one of us could have informed the school of what she was doing. She was risking her job to junk the science lesson for the day and tell a different truth. Did anyone else know what she was up to?

I didn’t survive an internment camp, but many years later, I also risked my job to tell the truth about war crimes. And I have been thinking a lot about those who are avoiding doing the same. The Good Germans who find excuses, reasonable or not, to stay silent as Israel commits the greatest genocide of our time using weapons that we are paying for. An estimated 186,000 are already dead, 70% of them women and children. There are maybe 20,000 Hamas fighters total.

Being Brave

I understand how painful it is, particularly for my Jewish friends, to confront the shattering truth. I also know how dangerous it is to speak up, having suffered the consequences myself (unlike my substitute teacher, I actually lost my job). When people say things like, “My employer won’t let me express political opinions” or “I don’t want to upset my Jewish friends” or “I need to keep my job until I retire because I won’t get another one,” I get it.* I am less sympathetic to: “Can’t we all just get along?” or “It’s complicated” as shorthand for “I just don’t want to get involved or learn what’s really going on or make excuses about human shields and who started it."

Nevertheless, this is a moment when each of us needs to very carefully think about what our moral red line is. And then not sashay past it like Joe Biden repeatedly has. We need to be honest with ourselves about what is a true risk and what merely makes us uncomfortable. To be as brave as we possibly can because lives depend on it. And because the shame of not doing so will never be extinguished, it will just smolder, and decades later someone like that substitute science teacher will call you out for letting it. As Annie Thibault, a Canadian aid worker who was stationed in Gaza as part of Doctors Without Borders’ emergency aid program this year put it, “This is not someone else’s war. What is happening in Gaza is happening to all of us." Watch this and tell me it's not. Tell me deliberately sniping children in the head isn't happening to all of us.

Ignoring the Pushback

You will undoubtedly make a nuisance of yourself reminding people it is happening to all of us, as I do. You will lose friends, as I did, including a lovely, now-former Facebook friend. I was arguing on her page with someone who was implying I am an anti-Semite for calling out genocide (this someone stans the horrible Hen Mazzig, who denies there’s actually a famine in Gaza), and the former friend posted rather disdainfully, “Must we?” Yes. We must.

I once worked with a white person who, for whatever reason, perhaps because she was raised in a racist household, loved to accuse others of racism, the point being to prove she knew more about the topic than people of color did. This sometimes involved twisting herself into knots of hypocrisy and contradiction and outright falsehoods. For example, she once complained to me that a woman of color whom we worked with was lazy. I pointed out that she’d just returned from maternity leave and had an infant at home, the implication clearly being that perhaps we should cut her some slack and thought that would be the end of it.

The next day, this person took me aside to tell me I shouldn’t use family circumstances to discriminate against someone. I was stunned. What kind of gaslit fuckery was this? I shot back that I was actually the one defending this person and that seemingly was the end of it. When others asked why I didn’t report her to HR, I said I’m not a tattletale like she turned out to be. Now she sits silent while Gazan children are killed and brags about being on the board of her kids’ Quaker school.*

Resetting

We all like to think we are doing the right thing and so find infinite ways to rationalize what are actually stupefyingly bad, self-serving and immoral decisions. Myself included, though I would hope not as immoral as those German citizens who pretended nothing was wrong outside the Zone of Interest. Sometimes, for the sake of humanity, we need a hard reset. This is one of those times. I see an image in my Twitter feed of a father carrying his dead son whose legs have been blown off, the skin and flesh waving in strips like a carwash mitter curtain, and ask myself: where are the others willing to bear witness to this horror? Where are the substitute teachers like the one who survived the internment camp to tell my science class about it?

Speaking of bear, Marcus eulogizing his mom. So perfect. I watched it with my son, since The Bear is our very favorite thing to lap up together. It made me wonder: How will my son eulogize me? I like to think that he will say I risked and lost a lot to denounce the murder of what will then be recorded and accepted as two million people. That I wasn’t a Good German, and though it was very hard not to be, it was never a fraction as hard as what the people of Gaza endured. That he was proud of me, not for sitting on the board of my kids’ school and virtue signaling, but for doing something less selfish and more important. That’s what keeps me going these days. How you’re remembered for what you did right here, right now, is what should keep you going, too, If not the lives of those In Gaza.

The photo is of a 6-year-old child who died of starvation in Gaza. Caused by the famine Hen Mazzig doesn't think is happening.

*My cousin-in-law was raised Quaker, as opposed to being a Quaker Until Graduation. This is not the way they roll.

**I have dear friends who are afraid to use the g-word in personal emails because they think Big Brother is watching. But do go on about who the real victims are here.