Most Saturday evenings, my wife and I join a silent vigil in Tel Aviv where each participant holds a photograph of a Gazan child killed in recent Israeli Defense Force attacks. There are a lot of them. We stand for an hour.
Some passers-by stop to look at the pictures and read the children’s names; others throw out a curse and keep walking. Strangely, unlike at many antigovernment protests I attend, where I feel a bit pointless, at this vigil I do feel of some use. It’s not much, but I am creating an encounter between a dead child and the gaze of a person who didn’t know that child existed.
On a recent Saturday, the vigil was more charged than usual. Hamas had just released a monstrous video showing the skeletal Israeli hostage Evyatar David digging his own grave upon his captors’ orders. A few people stopped as they walked past us. A man wearing swim shorts stared at me and asked me if I had seen the video: “He’s your people. It’s his picture you should be holding. His!” Another woman stopped and yelled at us: “It’s all Hamas propaganda! Don’t you get it? Those kids — It’s all A.I. They’re not real!”
It would have been easy for me to argue, to find myself condescending to these people’s claims. But because the vigil is silent, I was forced to just look at them and keep quiet. I’ve never been very good at keeping quiet. In some ways I’m like the running commentary on a director’s cut, with an answer or explanation for everything. I used to feel like the only one who did that, but now that social media is everywhere, it seems the whole world has become like me.
The man in the swim shorts tried to get a verbal response out of me, and when he failed, he quickly recalibrated and realized he could keep talking unhindered. His attempt to stir up an argument soon turned into a peculiar blend of internal monologue and Facebook post. He spoke about loss, and enemies, and this country of ours and what the hell has become of it, and about the hostages and his reserve duty and his nephew who’s serving in Gaza.
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