The other night I chaired a small group session of writers who spoke about the effect of the war on their writing.  As small as it was, almost every political opinion was voiced.  Only one of us lost their home, but all of us seem to have lost direction.   Who are we? Do we recognize ourselves?  What has happened to our lives?  Of course the people who came from abroad are a little less disoriented, but not much.  

Years ago a wrote an article about how people reacted in poetry to September 11 (https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-abstract/26/2/257/20856/The-Poetry-of-September-11-The-Testimonial?redirectedFrom=PDF)

, and suddenly I remembered it, and how different the grief and mourning was then from the crippling depth of mourning in our writers.  I’m sure this little group represents the way most Israelis feel about this war – helpless to the point of wordlessness.

The worst part of this is that even though we know theoretically about how people feel and live in Gaza, we have no communication.  All we hear are  threats, terrifying threats from Hamas. Hostage who were released tell of families who caged them, starved them, and demeaned them, and hostages still there are kept alive only to torture us with videos of their terrifying suffering.  Articles like that from the New Yorker this week that concentrate on the suffering of the Gazan population would be something with which we would identify with completely except for the fact that we can only think first of the terrible tortures, rapes, murders this population inflicted on our people.     

(https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/treating-gazas-collective-trauma)

It is almost impossible to form any kind of empathy with people who murdered your children and yet I am becoming convinced that the only way we can ease our pain is to talk. As much as we are repelled by one another, we suffer together.