We returned to Montreal from three weeks in Greece yesterday afternoon. This was not an island vacation, but rather a self-directed road trip during which we hoped to go deeper and learn more than we had in our previous two trips to the country. I have studied the language for a while, and though I knew that I didn't have any real facility, I hoped even a little bit of knowledge and effort would help us engage in conversations we might not otherwise have.
We had left on October 5, and on October 7 Israel was viciously attacked by Hamas, with many civilian and military casualties, hostages taken, and horrific accounts of death and dismemberment. Since then we have all seen what has transpired, with Gaza, already the largest open-air prison in the world, cut off and under constant bombardment, with huge numbers of civilian casualties, very little food and medical support, and a ground war looming. It is a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions, and the United States in particular, with a Democratic president no less, is supporting this unequal and massive military response. It has done so for a long time, because the history of what has happened to Palestine is now a very long one. It was around the year 2000 when a Palestinian mother told me about being strip-searched in front of her young daughter by Israeli border guards for no reason other than humiliation. If you don't know the history of what has happened to the Palestinians since 1947, but particularly since the current rightwing government has been in power, please educate yourself before taking a position.
Greece is a lot closer to the Middle East than North America, and it's close to the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Ukraine. It's a country whose people have often been victim to terrible governments, civil strife, and war, and their memory of those wars, of fascism and rightwing oppression, are very close to the surface; some of this is still happening today and we saw evidence of that - huge vans filled with riot police waiting to attack students demonstrating on behalf of migrants, for one example; squads of police on motorcycles with bullhorns driving through the student neighborhood of Exarchia in Athens at 9:00 am, just to intimidate. Political opinion there is not a "theory" or a "position" that you can take from relative safety; it comes from lived experience. As one fifty-year-old woman told us, "Under the junta you couldn't speak out. Now you can speak; that's the difference."
I was very willing to listen to what ordinary Greek people had to say. I heard no anti-semitic comments. There is an ongoing economic relationship with Israel, and Israelis are one of the largest groups of tourists who support Greece's economy. But I did hear great sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, just as there was for Armenians during that genocide in the early 1900s, when it was Greece who took in so many Armenian refugees. (As of the end of this September, 100,000 ethnic Armenians had been forced to flee Azerbijian -- and this is now a non-news story, because who knows or cares about the Armenians?) So we also heard a sense of helplessness in the face of countries with enormous wealth, weaponry, and power -- which you always hear when you talk to people who themselves have often felt powerless.
Our travels continued and we had many memorable experiences -- life goes on, and thankfully we don't lose the ability to feel pleasure and appreciate beauty even when we're hurting. But I cannot start talking about a trip here, or art, or beautiful places we saw, without acknowledging the backdrop of suffering that is happening in the world. I don't have any intention of diminishing the suffering of innocent Israeli victims in the process. I am sick at heart that there has not been a ceasefire, that humanitarian aid in massive volume has not been delivered to Gaza, that there seems to be no intention of the part of Israel or the West to search for a solution that will minimize more casualties, either now or in the future, that progressive Jewish voices are not being heeded, and that in effect a genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes. And I am particularly sickened that certain lives are counted as more valuable than others, by people whose religions teach that every single life is precious and that killing is wrong.
My mother-in-law was Armenian; I know what a genocide is. As a young girl whose father had fought in WWII, I remember the day he asked a Jewish man, his friend, to show me the numbers tattooed on his arm, so that I would see them and always remember. I know was a genocide is.
Those of us who see the present situation have to speak up, for our own consciences if nothing else. History repeats, and repeats, and it seems like we learn nothing: the strong crush the weak, and find reasons to blame the victims. Then they try to whitewash the facts, and if possible, bury those facts in a mass grave of forgetting; if the displaced and crushed people are then dispersed and homeless, with the victors taking their land and homes as their own, then it's far easier for them to be forgotten and their memories questioned. It's happened so many times.
But it's not coincidental that people who do remember those histories and who have been powerless victims themselves are the ones who see what is happening now, and are protesting against it or seeking solutions within the world bodies that exist to try to promote peace, like the U.N. Those who block these efforts, and those who are complicit, will have to live with themselves in the future, and perhaps they will be judged by a higher court than exists in the world of human beings. Right now, let us all do everything we can to help the victims of war, on every side, and to promote peace.
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