When We Meet: Thoughts as the Mideast War Approaches Its Second Year

Amidst the suffering of bereaved families, of innocent people, the fate of the hostages, the despair of those forced to flee their homes, and the anxiety that hangs heavy in the air, I see most clearly the sweet face of B., aged nine months. She wears pink-rimmed plastic glasses and loves her rattle, which she shakes vigorously in her little fist. She is curious to know the world around her and never sleeps in the car; buckled in, she tries to sit upright in her seat, as beautiful and bright as can be. As I watch her in the rearview mirror, I recall the first line of Mahmoud Darwish’s stunning four-line poem, written almost a quarter of a century ago: 

She says: When will we meet?

B. lives in a small Palestinian village near Hebron. To receive lifesaving treatment for her medical condition, her mother brings her to an Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv. She makes her way through two or three checkpoints, switching cars halfway until Tarkumia checkpoint, where she is picked up by a volunteer with Road to Recovery. I was lucky enough to be that volunteer one morning. My other passengers, a mother and a four-year-old boy, were late. I helped arrange B. in her collapsible stroller in the back seat and leaned in to check the buckles were secure. She looked up at me and held out her rattle. On impulse, I got into the back seat. B. was in the middle, her mother on one side and I on the other. I tried to get B. to smile, but she wouldn’t, and her mother laughed and said she was a hard sell and I would have to try harder. We chatted together, a little Arabic and a little Hebrew, and for a few moments, we were just two women cooing over a baby as the sun stained the sky pink and a stray dog wandered over to the parking lot where we waited.

He says: A year after the war ends

That was Sunday morning. The evening before, I went to a solidarity meeting for families of hostages in Carmei Gat, about half an hour from my house. It’s less a demonstration and more a show of support for the families evacuated from two kibbutzim in the south. There’s less shouting here. There are fewer calls to get rid of Bibi Netanyahu; there are no drums or whistles so common at the parallel demonstrations taking place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It’s a hot evening, even stifling. Here, almost everyone has lost a family member, a friend, a neighbor. Many of the people hid for hours on October 7 under beds, in bushes, in a safe room that was no longer safe. My friend from Kibbutz Beeri crouched behind a narrow door on the roof of his house with his wife. In the square at Carmei Gat, he greets me with a smile and a brief hug; he is far from recovering from the trauma.

At the end, the crowd of hundreds stands in silence while the names of hostages held by Hamas are read aloud. Every person has a name, a face. Finally, the number of days since October 7 is projected onto a huge screen, white on black. The numbers flash by. This week, they reached 357.

She says: When will the war end?

The people of Gaza are also counting the days. Last night, I spoke to a friend in Gaza, a talented writer who is reduced to living in a tent and who has lost dear ones in Israeli strikes. He is also counting the days.

He tells me he is tired, so tired.

What can we do? I ask. 

We have poetry, he says wearily.

He says: When we meet.

Sometimes, the two of us joke that we should meet. I imagine our meeting, wherever it might be—at a checkpoint, in a crowd, a car, a home. We’ll recognize each other right away. We’ll sit together, we’ll share photos, we’ll talk poetry.

I’m grateful for his continued friendship. I send him Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” a poem that has helped me through some rough times. I hope it will bring him some comfort, and I hope Google Translate will not ruin it. In English, it begins like this:

When despair for the world grows in me,

And I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests…

You see, the heart is still capable of empathy for others.

People tell me I’m wrong, confused, that the children I take to hospital will grow up to be terrorists and will come back to kill me or my children. People tell me the Israeli hostages are mostly dead anyway, that the state of Israel takes precedence over everything. People tell me I am salving my guilty conscience, that my words are an attempt to soften the violence of genocide. People tell me that I’m too wrapped up in the personal and that I should focus on the entities of power and oppression. People tell me that the death of innocents is unavoidable in war. What happened to the sanctity of life? What happened to basic decency? There is nothing more precious than life itself.

In 1783, Benjamin Franklin famously wrote, in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, that there never was a good war or a bad peace. He wrote it soon after the end of the American Revolutionary War he nevertheless favored, after eight long years of economic depression and untold numbers of deaths from war, disease, and hardship. Franklin wanted to resume his foray into science; in a postscript, he enthused over a hot-air balloon released over the village of Annonay, France.

He waited a long time to get back on track.

And now, a year has gone. The killing in Gaza continues, and hostilities in the north have evolved into open war. As Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh, said recently, we must do better. Ask me why I don’t leave this country, why I don’t go back to the U.K., where I lived until I was sixteen, and I will tell you this: Walking away, leaving this broken world behind, is the easy way out. I’m here because I have something to do—hold out a hand, coax a smile from a baby.

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