By Alexander Benjamin
I recently read a very touching piece in the Financial Times. It was a half-page story about a Gazan potter called Jaafar Atallah and how hard it’s been for him to make pottery and to find clay in Gaza since the war began.
And I have noticed a trend in many European outlets of stories about Gazans who are finding life very tough because of the ongoing situation there. Poets, writers, photographers, bakers… ‘people just like us’ is the subtext of these pieces. They are written to show how ordinary lives are affected by the war. And naturally, reading them is often difficult and harrowing. Our humanity cannot help but empathise.
But let us do a mental exercise briefly. Suppose you got into a taxi and struck up a conversation with the driver. Over the course of the drive, you find out about the hardships they have endured, perhaps a tough upbringing, maybe orphaned at an early age. You would of course empathise. Your taxi trip then takes you through an area with a lot of gay bars and rainbow flags. The taxi driver then tells you “these people disgust me, they should be executed or at the very least castrated. They are a cancer in our society and should be eradicated.”
Chances are you would not be so empathetic after all.
Let’s be honest. There were perhaps some wonderful artists and potters in Nazi Germany who supported national socialism and Jewish extermination. Their livelihoods may indeed have gone up in smoke in Dresden or Nuremberg. Their life’s work decimated in a matter of minutes.
And it is not beyond the realms of possibility that supporters of the Myanmar junta and their genocide against the Rohingya, can in fact make exquisite lace doilies. Or that ISIS supporting women can fashion some beautifully intricate knitwear. The leaders of the Taliban might also be prolific philatelists. ‘People just like us’.
Context matters. The whole story matters. Just like our taxi driver.
What concerns me about these human interest pieces about life in Gaza is that we are being manipulated. Without the full picture, we cannot but empathise. But with it, would we?
Not one of these pieces about the hardships endured – and I want to underline the undoubtedly impossibly difficult circumstances that many Gazans find themselves in – saw fit to ask if they support Hamas, the October 7th massacre, and the taking of women and children and dead bodies of murdered Israelis hostage.
What we read instead is just a very sad piece about human suffering. Or to put it another way, we didn’t take the turn down through the gay district with our taxi driver.
It would be utterly cruel and heartless to say that people deserve what they get.
But we must at least get the full picture before we pass judgement, either good or bad.
Is there not a duty in the interests of accurate journalism to do that? To ask the knitters, potters and lace makers how they feel about the acts being done in their name?
I would very much like to know how Mr Atallah feels about the murdering of Jews and of the kidnapping of the Bibas children, and their strangling in captivity. Maybe he supports it, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he curses Hamas every day, maybe his son has served with them, maybe his son still does. We don’t know because the journalist never asked. If he or she did, then at least I would have the full picture. I could choose my level of empathy accordingly.
What we do know is that a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that almost three in four Palestinians continue to support the October 7 attack, even after knowing exactly that took place.
The values people hold should matter every bit as much as the hardship they endure.
I know some violin players. Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator was a passionate violinist. It is said he’d recite a canto by Dante every morning. You won’t find many mourning his loss to the music world. Because he wasn’t ‘just like us’.
Alexander Benjamin is the Vice-Chairman of the European Jewish Association, based in Brussels and representing hundreds of Jewish communities across the continent.