I am awake in the wee hours of a cold December morning, wrapped in a recently de-pilled and darned cashmere blanket which is as decadent and humbling as it sounds. I have lit a single candle and it is helping to make my inability to sleep feel less like a failure and more like a personal choice. I’ll take a page from Katherine May and call it night waking. I’ll embrace the fact that my brain turned itself on at an hour generally considered unreasonable, which is also to acknowledge that a brain bombarded in daylight hours with images of death and destruction is not a brain that can easily rest. I’ll try to write something. It will not be enough.
In sleep and in waking, I see children. Children caked in thick, gray dust. Children trembling. Children on hospital floors, their battered chests rising rapidly, desperate for air. Children returned to their families, unable to speak. Children, beaten. Babies limp in their parents’ arms. Babies bodies decomposing in hospital beds. Children’s bodies swaddled in white plastic burial shrouds.
Across the backyard, there’s a newborn crying. In the evenings lately, we’ve noticed the new parents pacing in their lit-up wintertime windows. We’ve spotted the tiny bundle in their arms, recognized the particular sway and bounce of cajoling an infant into sleep. The windows are dark now, but the cry briefly penetrates the night, the mechanical bleat of a brand new baby looking for comfort.
I’ve spent more money than I should have in the past week. New duvets, plus covers to fit, for three children who have outgrown, by some years now, their toddler-sized ones. They need to be warm, I reasoned. They need something to burrow under, something soft and cozy to cocoon themselves in. I need them to be warm. I spent too much time searching for the best options. I deliberated between colors, toggling from store to store comparing details and sales. I entered my credit card information as if children elsewhere are not being turned to dust.
The baby cries out again. This time the light flickers on. I cannot see, but I imagine a muslin swaddle being loosened, a mouth gulping and sputtering at a nipple, tiny fingers grasping at larger ones. Soon a fresh cloth will be smoothed over the end of a bed. The tiny, sated human will be placed on top, one corner will be tucked under the curve of a freshly diapered bottom, the other will be drawn snugly in the opposite direction, pinning arms next to a full, rounded belly. A velvet soft head will be kissed. (I can smell it, can’t you?) Parents will utter a silent prayer for sleep.
It is exhausting work, caring for babies. It demands waking up when we are tired, going to them when we are ourselves depleted. It is also simple work. It doesn’t require great learning or even, always, resources. In all of the most meaningful ways, we’re hardwired for the job. We give babies a warm place to sleep. We wrap their tiny bodies in soft cloths. We hold them close and give them food when they ask for it, which is often. We coax them to sleep. We offer our protection. We don’t turn away. We keep them alive.
If you haven’t yet joined the calls for permanent ceasefire in Israel/Gaza, I hope you will. If you don’t have your elected officials in your phone contacts, I hope you’ll add them. If you’re looking for a simple tool to help you make the calls, try 5calls.org.
I was going to comment yesterday, but I decided to give it a day. I think you are very brave for posting on the politics of something that I think has affected us all, including me as a Jewish mother and mother of Jewish children. I work with victims of genocide and on issues of human rights, and I have so many feelings all over the place on this one. My strongest feeling is that no child should ever be buried; no parent should ever have to bury her child. Never. Under any conditions. I feel that way for Gazans, for Israelis, for Sudanese, for Saudi Arabian, for Chinese -- I don't care whom. The universality we all share is a love for our children. I also know that the issue of Israel and Palestine is long and complicated, and support for Israel does not mean that we cannot also fight for two states and let Palestinians live in their own state in peace. That is what I want. However, even if Israel leaves Gaza, that will not happen. Hamas is a terrorist organization, not a government, not freedom fighters. Palestinians have been offered their own country multiple times over the past 70+ years, including as recently as 20 years ago, and they walked away. Instead, they elected a terrorist organization to govern them, and that organization has funneled money that could be use to lift up the people of Palestine into weapons, tunnels, and the support of their leaders who live the good life in Qatar. They have torn down the infrastructure Israel had built there for the betterment of the Palestinian people when Israel left in 2005. And they have despotically harmed the very Palestinian people the group purports to support. Women, LGBTQ+, and any one who criticizes Hamas are punished severely, often through torture and death. Hamas is made up of animals - not ones who want to fight for the freedom of the Palestinian people (they could have but didn't). They want to fight for the destruction of Jews. Hamas is no different and no better than any other group that espouses radical Islamic views. So what of a cease-fire? Oh my heart says yes. We have to protect those children. But I also know that Israel cannot live side by side with Hamas. Israel ignored the rockets poring into Israel from hamas for years. Israel ignored the kidnappings of soldiers. But Israel cannot ignore what happened on October 7. If there is a cease fire, Hamas wins. Full-stop. Hamas has dug these tunnels and is fighting in buildings housing civilians, who are being harmed. If any other country in the world was in Israel's situation, no one would bat an eye at it defending itself. How do I know that? We have real, true, genocides occuring all over the world at this very moment: China is ethnically cleansing the Uyghurs; there is a genocide occurring in the DRC and in Sudan; Rohingya and others are being bombed to oblivion by the Burmese government. Where is the BDS movement against those countries? Why aren't thousands of people fighting for the freedom of Uyghurs in East Turkestan? Because these kinds of protests only occur against Israel. If Mexican terrorists came into the US and did what Hamas did to Israel, no one would say a word about the retribution we would enact. But we speak out against Israel. If the world truly cared about Palestinians (which I don't think it does), then they would be protesting Egypt for not opening its border to refugees, as Jordan and Turkey did for Syrians. Hamas has to go. There is no other solution: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/06/hamas-genocide-against-israel/ (Now, even as Israel seeks to find and destroy Hamas terrorists, much of the discussion has moved on to considering how to achieve peace between Israel and Palestinians. But what happened on Oct. 7 cannot be consigned to the violent past; it cannot be lumped in with all the other terrorist attacks and massacres that have marked the sorry history of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.)
Love you.