We Have Failed the Victims of Oct. 7

Right after our daughter Wednesday was born, I’d panic at the sound of a baby crying.

I could be miles away from her but if an infant screamed within earshot, I’d start looking for Wednesday. It always took a few seconds to snap out of it.

It’s the same feeling I’d get while standing over her crib at night to see if she was still breathing. It was ridiculous, the thought that our perfectly healthy baby would just die without warning. And yet, there I was sneaking around the nursery, locking eyes with that tiny belly until it moved.

We love our children in ways that transcend reason. All of us. Israelis. Palestinians. Lebanese.

I can’t imagine how I’d feel if Wednesday was among those taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 or one of the 36 children murdered that day. Could my love for our daughter turn to boundless rage? Probably.

At the same time, I don’t know how I’d react if Wednesday were one of the over 15,000 children killed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) since Oct. 7. Would that radicalize me? Probably.

And now that Israeli war planes are dropping bombs over Beirut, a city of 2.5 million, more children will die and more parents, should they survive, will lose the will to live.

Nothing justifies this. There is no moral or political reasoning that could convince me to accept the slaughter of children.

The horrors of Oct. 7 have been repeated almost daily in Gaza and the West Bank. This past year, we’ve seen children killed by bombs and shot in the head by IDF soldiers. Cut off from aid trucks, by Israeli settlers and soldiers, they’ve starved to death. Without access to clean drinking water, they’ve contracted hepatitis, scabies, chickenpox and even polio.

When they’re told, by the IDF, to move from one part of Gaza that’s being bombed, they arrive at the “safe zone” only to be bombed again in a day or two. Thousands of children don’t die by accident. Pre-teenage kids don’t accidentally get shot in the head and chest. Babies in a war zone don’t starve because of a simple oversight.

These children are dying because the Israeli high command has decided their death is just the cost of their war.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his army will keep dropping bombs on civilians even if the hostages are returned, it’s clear that the killing of innocents — far from being an anomaly in this war — is one of the IDF’s most reliable tactics. It is no different than Hamas commanders deciding the death of 36 children on Oct. 7, the killing of civilians, the taking of hostages, were acceptable in its war against Israel.

We cannot allow politicians to use their memory to justify killing on an industrial scale. It cheapens the lives of those children whose only sin was being born on the wrong side of a fence. Be they Israeli, Palestinian or Lebanese.

In a moral world, the global community would impose sanctions, it would force negotiations, it would see governments move heaven and earth to stop the war. In a moral world, millions of Palestinians wouldn’t live in a territory the size of Montreal, surrounded by a wall, hemmed in by one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world and whose food and water supply can be (and has been) cut off by Israel.

But we don’t live in a moral world.

One of the aspects of Judaism that resonates with me is how the concept of God differs from how us Christians see divinity. God, in Judaism, is unknowable. God is everything that was, that is and that will be. 

God exists in Netanyahu just as it does in the children huddling together around a bonfire in Gaza tonight. When we kill them, when we kill anyone, we kill that which is most sacred. 

Today, more than any other day, I will think about our children.

All of them.

Because they are all our children. And there is no one who can convince me an Israeli child is worth any less or any more than a Palestinian child. Or that Arabs love their kids any differently than Jews do. 

This may be the most nefarious affect of all the propaganda we’ve consumed this past year. That somehow, the other side loves their children less, that somehow, the other side is less human.

So today, I will pray as I do most days. And I will say a prayer for the families who haven’t seen their loved ones since Oct. 7. I will say a prayer for the parents who’ve lost a child in the relentless bombing that followed. Mostly, I will pray for peace.

Because after a year of total war, peace seems a much more distant possibility now than it did on Oct. 7.