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Frumi

Lebensraum: What You Won’t Pass Back You Will Pass Forward


The violence of oppression and the violence in resistance cannot be compared. Pushed to a corner, helpless and hopeless humans sometimes lash out. Surviving is a cornerstone of the human experience. When subjected to trauma, it is true that not all act in peace.

While peaceful protest is preferred, the reaction to injury can sometimes grow teeth. It is a desperate attempt to protect what should never have been violated; every living creature on this planet has minimum agreed upon rights.


The oppressor chooses violence, while the one who resists it is left with no choice. The question has been shouted, and a response is imminent. Even no response is a response in itself.


Holding each of our rights beyond reproach, it is the duty of the struggling and even those who witness, to protect that which should not have been disturbed. If we do not protect the social contract so many of our nations have rightfully signed (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), it is of little value.


In its strength is our own desire to live justly and freely protected, and in its violation is a violation to each of our own individual safeties. Where injustice can be done to another, without reproach; it can certainly happen to us.


Cycles of violence are not stopped by addressing what can only be called a human retort. When your family member is blown to pieces in front of your eyes; I can imagine some may resort to vengeance over justice. Those who do not, are a shining example of patience. A patience, which we would all like to have, yet cannot readily ascribe to the human condition.


Living under constant threat, bondage and persecution warps a person’s mind-space. Reacting to trauma from stability is one reality. Reacting to trauma from such abject listlessness is quite another.


No human will condone such violence, but condemning a reaction to a tragic infliction is also foolish. It denies the reality of human nature, and merely gives the oppressor the fodder to continue in their cause.


Lumping all resistors together and branding them as terrorists, the march of military boots knows no end. Violence will only stop when the oppressed are eliminated, or if the inception of the violence is addressed.

What is happening in Israel and the Palestinian Territories is not however about violence, safety or indeed self defense. It is about the creation of a living space for the Jewish community. It is about the systematic elimination of the Palestinian people and the annexation of their land and resources.


Violence can easily be brought to an end, and the rights of the Palestinian people can easily be represented and honored under one or more national banners. If the question was about equity, the answers are many.


What is taking place in Sheikh Jarrah is not dissimilar to trauma faced by the Jewish people in Nazi Germany on Kristallnacht. Hamas itself is not dissimilar to the Jewish guerrillas, the Partisans, in their desire to respond to the aggressor. That eras Molotov cocktails were as useless against the far stronger German state as the home made Al-Quds rockets are now against Israel.

Many in the Jewish community who witnessed the atrocities of November 1938 lament, how cruel a person must be to inflict such pain on another. How absent humanity is from the faces of human beings.


As events continue to unfold across Israel and the Palestinian Territories, we stand a hop, skip and jump from the Madagascar Plan and the camps of the Final Solution. The victim, has now become the oppressor. The Jewish Question, is now coined as the Demographic Problem. Where the Nazis could not find their humanity, I wonder if the Israelis will?


Their ancestors wailed at the plight their community faced, and not many Germans nor the world stood up to stop injustice till it was too late. I wonder if Israelis can look themselves in the mirror, place their trauma, and find their authenticity once again. More than labels and roles, we are human.


If anyone can relate to the struggle of the Palestinian people most; it is the Jews without graves, and their descendants who pray for them.


~Frumi

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