White Savior (ish)

Not long ago, a friend of mine called my writing “white savior-ish.” I took the words as I must, not with defensiveness but with a sense of responsibility. Not only for what I write, but for what I am. For I am indeed white, and I carry that knowledge into every room, every argument, and every silence that surrounds this unspeakable suffering, suffering that most of us can only witness from a distance, buffered by the accident or miracle of where we were born.

There is a kind of tyranny in silence, just as there is a danger in speaking from afar. I have been told that because I am not crushed beneath the immediate weight of conflict, my voice should fall quiet. But I wonder: Might not a person, free from the immediate fires, see with clarity those things that flames obscure? To be untouched by grief does not mean to be unmoved by it, nor should it render one’s witness useless.

When we see Gaza (when we try to see) we must refuse the ancient seduction of blaming whole peoples for the sins of the powerful. I do not, cannot, blame the Jewish people or the entire nation for the horror that has unfolded. I know the history. I know the sharp, cold shadow thrown by antisemitism, and I know that the Holocaust was very real. Anyone who would embrace hatred of Jews can expect nothing from me, no comfort, no excuse, no solidarity.

But honesty must matter more than placation. The truth, as I have read it and watched it play out, cannot be tied up with convenient distractions or easy heroes and villains. The brutality visited upon Palestinians cannot be diminished, explained away, or fit neatly into the storylines of the powerful. The world watches these horrors in 4k delivered by glowing screens in every hand, and still the dying continues. If Israel and the United States want peace, they must want it enough to tear down the war machinery that makes peace impossible and death inevitable.

I do not believe, cannot believe - that the world’s leading humanitarian organizations, those who labor to alleviate human suffering, have entered into some monstrous conspiracy to twist the facts coming from Gaza. Nor does it seem reasonable that the world’s journalists have abandoned every principle at once. The numbers speak not only of loss but of the cold math of indifference: tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, so many of them children and mothers, and the whole world asked to pretend that such imbalance is justified by anything that calls itself war.

I do not hold my Jewish friends responsible for what is done in their name. I have tried to understand the fear and defensiveness that curl around their hearts, the kind I see in those whose backs are forever up against the wall. Human beings have not evolved when survival does not breed generosity but instead the terrible certainty that only the worst can be expected from others. But no conversation, no warning, no plea has convinced me that what is happening now is anything but the use of overwhelming force against a largely defenseless people.

The toll in Gaza is more than numbers; it is a measure of how little the lives of some people seem to count. To call these figures false, one must bring something more than denial. Since October 2023, Israel has locked the gates to journalists and dared the world to trust only official voices. The silence imposed is as political, and as violent, as any bomb.

So I am left with a question, as simple as it is unavoidable: If the testimonies of the dead and the breathing alike are lies, why fear the truth? If what is said from Gaza is false, let the world’s witnesses see, let their voices be heard because every single one of us should be for finding peace and an end to this conflict. One that accounts for the rest of the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.