No flag inspires more contradictory, entangled feelings in me than the flag of Israel. Like everyone sympathetic to the Jewish cause who grew up in the latter half of the 20th Century, I was seduced by the mythology of Israel, home for the oppressed, a brave David standing up to the Goliath of combined forces from the Arab world bent on destroying it. And even taking into account the highly problematic circumstances of its birth, they were seen then in the broadest sense (with some notable exceptions) the good guys. When did that change for me? And when did it change for the world?  A family member who I love dearly has been sharing rabidly pro-Israeli content from social media arguing that the Gaza famine was a hoax perpetuated by gullible media outlets and talk of genocide is equally ridiculous. One is introduced by someone saying, "It's simple!" before a well-known American writer and frequent news show panelist makes that the case that what's happening can't be ethnic cleansing because not enough civilians have been slaughtered. I don't respond but I do leave a dissenting comment to the video amid all the yellow thumbs up and emphatic exclamations of agreement. I quote an Israeli cabinet minister saying there should not be any Arabs in Gaza. I do this once in a while, leaving a comment that swims against the tide. Not because I think I'll change anyone's mind, but because I think it's important to see another point of view, expressed concisely without rancor. Maybe it plants a seed that one day might sprout an idea in someones mind.

Recently I came across a short story and a poem that came closest to expressing how I feel on the issue. Maybe because creative writers are more practiced at empathizing with others points of view and searching for nuanced truths that have been trampled in the aftermaths of ideological stampedes.   In the short story "My Camp" Joshua Cohen describes the feelings of his protagonist after October 7th in an honest way that skirts against uncomfortable truths. He's reluctant to admit that his overriding feeling after that horrible event was "resentment towards the reaction of those around me. I recognized in me that same ambivalence about others' certainty." He explains how sometimes it's healthy to dwell within your own uncertainty and "let yourself be tortured by your conflicting mind and heart." Perhaps bombing civilians back to the stone age is not an appropriate response to an atrocity. Maybe  Zionism - at its root a logical and even noble movement in response to an earlier form of ethnic cleansing -  cannot be equated with Genocide with the stroke of a Sharpie.

On another day as world leaders gathered inside the UN to share their points of view, there was a strange parade of contradictions: Orthodox Jews rallying against Israel, chanting that Netanyahu does not speak for them and that "Occupation of Palestine is a violation of Judaism." Small boys with shaved forelocks carried Palestinian flags that dwarfed them. The scene seemed contradictory, confusing, so for me entirely logical and appropriate to the situation. The sight of a group of people swimming upstream - for whatever reason, reassured me.

Then a few weeks later, a poem finds me by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.  It waves the flag of doubt for a nation I want to belong to:

From the place where we are right

Flowers will never grow

In the Spring

The place where we are right

is hard and trampled

like a yard

But doubts and loves

dig up the world

like a mole, a plow

And a whisper will be heard in

the place

where the ruined

house once stood