Ceasefire Now… But Then What?

It’s been an exhausting couple of months.

I don’t really think that I have a huge right to complain in a lot of respects as someone who sees no real danger in my position as a Jewish man typing this polemic from my mid-rise apartment in Austin, Texas while on the other side of the world there are thousands upon thousands suffering and dying, but my ability to engage with regular life gives me the privilege of time to compose my thoughts; I figure that I should use that privilege. I’ve let some thoughts slip in the form of walls of text on instagram story posts, but I’ve been really trying to make a more concerted effort to rein in my frustrations, not reply to anyone’s posts, and be very intentional about how I articulate a stance that I know most people I know and love will disagree with. Nonetheless, after two months of stress, tears, irritation, anger, sadness, guilt, and tense exchanges with loved ones about our ideological differences, I feel as though there is one thing that needs to be asked of anyone who cares enough about the people of Palestine and Israel to make their voices heard on one side or another of this issue:

What’s next?

It seems simple and one would imagine that there are many avenues that the politically involved may go down when such a question is posed to them, but I think many would be surprised to know that there hasn’t been a lot of critical thought regarding what a post-war Gaza and Israel will look like from the some of the loudest voices on this topic. It seems as though any intellectual musing has been reduced to slogans and hashtags. It’s hard to explain to anyone who is new to the Israel-Palestine conflict why chants of “Ceasefire now!” can’t just be boiled down to “pro genocide” or “anti genocide” because for many of these people, there is no space for nuance between “Israel bad, Palestine good”. Frankly, I’m not here to give anyone a history lesson, but suffice to say that if you care to work towards an end to the tragic bloodshed that’s occurring in Gaza, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper than the headlines.

Before I go on, I’m going to just knock out some easy talking points so that we can have a conversation about this like adults who don’t get all their news from twitter hot takes:

1. Over forty percent of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel. For perspective, about thirty six percent of the world’s Jewish population was lost in the Holocaust. By current estimates, Jews are about one and a half million people away from returning to pre-Holocaust numbers. I can’t attempt to apply objectivity to emotion, but I would attempt to appeal to anyone who is against the existence of Israel to understand the attachment that countless members of the Jewish population around the world have to the concept of Jewish self-determination and how that has manifested in the Israel project.

2. Over fifty percent of the population of Israel is not the image of the Israeli citizen that is often being evoked in conversations regarding settler-colonialism in relation to the Israeli populace (read as: white). This includes over three million Mizrahi Jews (which, for those who are unfamiliar, is a term applied to descendants of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa; in this classification are the descendants of Mashriqi Jews who had lived in Middle Eastern countries, such as Yemenite, Egyptian, Iranian, Kurdish, Lebanese, Syrian, Turkish and Iraqi Jews; as well as the descendants of Maghrebi Jews who had lived in North African countries, such as Algerian, Libyan, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews) as well as a touch under two million Israeli Muslims. Therefore, I will insist that breaking this conflict down to “white settlers vs. an indigenous population” is not only reductive, but tragically indicative of an attempt to apply American power dynamics to an inapplicable scenario.

3. Hamas is anti-Jewish. I really won’t entertain any argument to the contrary with consideration that leaders of this organization have gone on record to make this clear. Political Islam is a relatively new concept that Hamas was born out of and while Islam is absolutely not an anti-Jewish religion, political Islam as a concept has often been weaponized against Jews. There’s lots of history to this and I’m firmly aware of the fact that these antisemitic sentiments have been sharpened as a response to settler violence in the West Bank and various incursions from the Israeli government since 1967. The relevance of pointing out Hamas’s anti-Jewish sentiments is to highlight that religious pluralism is already a pretty foreign concept in many Arab countries in which very little exists in the way of religious or ethnic minorities, so the idea that we could simply abolish Israel and leave the aforementioned huge number of Jewish people who would call this area home whether or not Israel existed in a state of safety is a bold claim.

4. Many Jews see anti-Zionism as antisemitism. I have complicated feelings about this, but it is helpful to realize that Zionism isn’t just some abstract concept that seeks to establish a Jewish state in the middle east, but rather a political strategy that has already been fully realized in many respects. Zionism established Israel and while there was once a time in which Zionism could once not be mutually exclusive with the specific geography of Israel as we currently know it, that ceased to be the case over seventy five years ago. Like it or not, Zionism no longer asks the question of whether or not Israel has the right to exist, but rather if one supports the safety, self-determination, and prosperity of the nearly ten million people that now exist within Israel’s borders of which include seven million of the world’s sixteen million Jews. Whether or not you agree with the actions of Israel’s government or the path that has led us from the time of Israel’s founding to now, one must accept that these people are there now and that there is no viable reality in which they will no longer be there. So when we debate the efficacy and/or ethics of Zionism, I would implore you to allow this perspective into the framework of these discussions.

5. Criticism of Israel, Israel’s government, or of Israel’s conduct in their relationship with Palestine is not antisemitic. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that criticisms that fall into these categories are inherently absolved of antisemitism. In fact, much of the framework used in these criticisms has slipped into antisemitism by voicing calls for a free Palestine to Jews who have nothing to do with the conflict (read as: almost fucking all of us) for simply existing and having the audacity to celebrate our holidays while the world is falling apart around us. Alternatively, much of the rhetoric that is shared on social media is propagated by think tanks that are literally funded by the Qatari and Saudi Arabian governments which… is obviously a problem. It doesn’t feel as though many of us are engaging critically with this sort of propaganda in the same way that we would criticize people on the other side for not contending with obvious Israeli propaganda coming from a far-right government. It’s worthy of consideration that there is an incomprehensible amount of information floating around the internet these days about this conflict and that much of it will inherently be misleading or outright false. While mindless regurgitation of this propaganda isn’t necessarily consciously antisemitic, we have to contend with the fact that sometimes, it just is– regardless of intention– in the same way that failing to dispel the obvious attempts of Israel’s government to dehumanize the innocent people in Gaza is orientalist and racist.

6. Nothing we post matters in the grand scheme of things. Even this. Despite losing international support of the assault on Gaza, Netenyahu’s government has not altered their tactics in the slightest. In other words, despite two months of marches, outcry, and attempts at a strike, the IDF is still killing Palestinians by the thousands and it doesn’t really seem to show any sign of stopping. This is not to say that we should all shrug our shoulders and not care about this human rights atrocity,  but we should go into these discussions fully knowing that our instagram stories aren’t a form of activism. I would like to think that this understanding of the futility of social media will give us all agency to have these discussions like adults instead of terminally-online children.

Now, having read all of that, I think you may be surprised to know that I am, in fact, in favor of a ceasefire. Not that it super matters what I think, but I would just like to make it clear that someone can, in fact, represent all of the ideas that I just espoused and still be in favor of achieving peace and ending the bloodshed that we’ve been seeing for two months. That said, I do believe that I still owe a follow up to the original query: what’s next?

Well, if you asked a lot of the people whose political leanings on this issue can be summed up in a hashtag, the obvious next step is to prosecute several key members of the Israeli government for war crimes and begin the process of giving the land currently known as Israel back to Palestine. As much as I agree that Netanyahu and several other members of his cabinet need to answer for the massive civilian casualties at the Hague, the idea that Israel is just going to go away in some one-state-solution pipe dream is an insane suggestion. I would like to make one thing very clear: despite my or anyone else’s feelings on the existence of Israel, its origins, or its government’s conduct as of late, Israel is here to stay; “from the river to the sea” Palestine will never again be. I’m not typing that out with a smile on my face, but I’m attempting to grapple with this with a sense of realism. There are literal billions of dollars worth of arms and funding from the west flowing through Israel’s proverbial veins. Israel boasts one of the strongest military and intelligence operations in the world. Israel has damn near unconditional support from the United States which, in case anyone’s tuned out recently, is basically an unstoppable force of capital and military might. Again, I’m not boasting about this, but anyone who refuses to admit that these are key factors that will ensure the continued existence of Israel for the foreseeable future is deluded at best.

Equipped with the understanding that Israel isn’t going anywhere and that our collective “revolutionary spirit” is serving our egos more than it’s serving the Palestinian people, we need to find a collective understanding of what we expect the next steps to be. I’m no expert; the thought of trying to present a fully fleshed out action plan for the resolution of this conflict feels pretty cringe with consideration to the fact that I (surprise) do not work for the state department and do, in fact, work at a restaurant. That said, I think we should build upon a collective agreement of what the viable next steps in the process will be, but to do that, we should be considerate of the fact that there is a difference between what we want versus what we can reasonably expect to get here if the immediate preservation of human life is the goal post we’re working towards.

Most pressing of all things here is the demand for a ceasefire to end the needless bloodshed in Gaza. To get a more permanent version of this from the Israeli government, the hostages need to be returned and Hamas needs to surrender. If there is any inkling that anyone is still carrying for some hope of Hamas victory, you’re putting some adventurist desire for “revolution” in front of the lives and safety of tens of thousands of people which, coming from the sidelines in the states, is a despicable prioritization of your desire to cosplay as a revolutionary over actual human beings that you chauvinistically think you know better than. Whether or not you agree with Hamas is obviously a matter of concern for me, but ultimately, not something that is relevant to the argument at hand. At the end of the day, we want the people of Palestine to stop dying and we have to be realistic about what it’s going to take to make that happen - morally correct or not, we can debate that when we have the luxury of people not dying as a result of our inaction.

Unfortunately, even such a loaded, divisive question of how we can successfully demand a ceasefire is still the easiest question to contend with because in case this is anyone’s first go around with the cycle of “Hamas attack, brutal Israeli response, ceasefire, Hamas attack, etc”, I have news: we’ve been down this road before. Ending the violence now has never in the history of this conflict been a guarantee to end this violence going forward. I think it goes without saying that the Israeli government has committed untold atrocities that have exacerbated the violence and cruelty of Hamas. For my friends who are staunchly pro-Israel, I would like to ask you to let go of the tribalist dogma for a moment and consider that the Israeli government has done a lot to sour relations with Palestine since 1967 and that there is a tremendous responsibility upon the shoulders of Israeli policymakers and military leaders for the loss of life and the state of diplomacy between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. Consider that, whether we like it or not, Israel now represents the Jewish people on the world stage and that we have to pressure Israel to demonstrate Jewish values among which senseless killing and terror is not welcome. To my friends who are staunchly anti-Israel, I would like to ask you to consider that Fatah/the Palestinian Authority has lost a grasp on Palestine outside of some areas of the West Bank due to Hamas’s insistence that terrorism is the only path forward for their idea of a liberated Palestine. Consider that Israel was beginning to expand upon Palestinian citizenship and job opportunities while normalizing relations with the rest of the Arab world which is - on record - the primary reason why Hamas attacked - so that the world would reignite their vitriol towards Israel and continue to martyrize the Palestinian people with which the leaders of Hamas keep their distance from the safety of their homes in Qatar and Lebanon.

With these considerations made, we must all come together and demand new leadership in both Israel and in Palestine. The current Israeli administration and Hamas must be unceremoniously removed and tried for their crimes against both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. The new Israeli administration must rise in tandem with Fatah so that true diplomacy can be achieved and Israel can invest in the infrastructure and future prosperity of Palestine - which is action that other countries such as the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar need to be taken to task for as well for their contributions to this perpetual violence so that we can expedite the process of getting Palestinians back on their feet after the great suffering that they have experienced. But if we continue to live in denial of each side’s contribution to the suffering of one another, we are doomed to continue upon this path to be consumed by violence and hatred ad nauseam.

But where does that leave us? In my deepest hopes and aspirations, it leaves us to find the common ground necessary to affect change instead of screaming at each other from the insurmountable peaks of partisan self-reverence that we stand upon when we insist on correctness over victory or progress. I am just one voice advocating for us to look at the picture of death and despair that’s been painted for us through the eyes of another so that we can achieve a sense of humanity that may carry us forward into an era of peace and prosperity. I am begging for us all to stop assuming that we can dumb down complex geopolitical struggles of which I would need several novels worth of pages to provide a poignant historical context to inflate our sense of self-righteousness while denying the compassion and consideration of those who see things differently than us. It is only through a relinquishment of our egos and our insistence upon being the smartest person in the room or the best ally that we will actually take the first steps towards the preservation of human life that, despite our differences, we all care about very deeply. We may not see justice in the way that we fantasize justice to look like, but if we try hard enough and all try to engage the fight for peace in good faith, we may see peace and that has to be good enough for us at some point.

Said much more eloquently than I am capable of:

“We are trapped, you and I, in a seemingly hopeless cycle. Not a "cycle of violence" -- a lazy formulation that tells us nothing about why our conflict exists, let alone how to end it. Instead, we're trapped in what may be called a "cycle of denial." Your side denies my people's legitimacy, my right to self-determination, and my side prevents your people from achieving national sovereignty. The cycle of denial defines our shared existence, an impossible intimacy of violence, suppression, rage, despair.

That is the cycle we can only break together.”

― Yossi Klein Halevi, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

is it good?

As I recall, the night of the incident was a Thursday during that anticipatory part of October in which the four weeks of cool air and less oppressive sunlight that Texas is contractually obligated to hasn’t quite started, but a sporadic day or two of rain has reminded us that this time exists and is coming. In the dimly-lit dining room of this brand new restaurant, my slightly-too-small white button down tucked into my Levi’s found itself in a similar period of adjustment as I fidgeted with the fabric to remedy the discomfort that the tugging straps of my apron caused. A subtle sweat trickled from my brow in a frustrating showing of the fact that no matter how well-designed or controlled a dining room’s air conditioning system is, the workers who exist within it will never be comfortable with the temperature. From inside the vast expanse of my apron, I fished out a corkscrew boasting the same attention-grabbing branding as the rest of the restaurant - a detail that does little other than to serve as a reminder of how intentionally curated every detail in this boutique restaurant is. With my tool in hand, I was now on stage. The audience: a four-top of business-casual clad twenty-somethings - two men and two women by the look of them, but you can never be too sure so best not to be presumptuous. The show: a bottle of Borja Perez “Artifice” Listán Negro, vintage 2019.

With the bottle resting against my white-linen-laden forearm, I lean over the young woman who ordered the wine from me to present the bottle while her friends chatter. I always hold my breath during this part because I have a strange apprehension about breathing on the guests which only makes the seconds that pass between my presentation of the bottle and the guest’s approval of it seem longer. She confirms that this is the imbibement that they’ll be enjoying this evening and with a subtle smile and a nod, I return to my upright position, secure the white linen on my arm, and flip the blade out of my corkscrew. As if the small, serrated blade that I cut the foil with was a machete, the conversation stops abruptly and they all stare at me as I make two cuts along the neck of the bottle to release the cork from its foil prison.

I hate when this happens. My preference for conversation to continue and for no acknowledgement of my presence to occur while I do this is so strong that any alternative experience is borderline irritating. I quickly pop the foil cap off, sneak it into my apron, then rotate the bottle forty-five degrees to start twisting the coil into the cork. It’s at this point in time that one of the gentlemen at the table decides to test me which, ninety-eight percent of the time feels harmless at worst and coming from a place of genuine interest at best, but this immediately felt like the two percent exception. This man clearly knew something about this wine and wanted to use me as a vessel to demonstrate this knowledge to his peers.

“So what do you know about this wine?” he says to me with one eyebrow slightly raised to match the half smirk that’s recently found its way upon his face. Admittedly, wine has never been my strong point in the restaurant game. While I certainly know more than your average Joe, in this environment, I’m outclassed by several of my colleagues that, under most circumstances, I would be happy to tap for any wine-related questions that I didn’t immediately possess an answer for, but on this luckiest of days, I was within close enough of proximity from a recent wine class in which we covered this exact bottle to provide some coherent responses.

“Certainly.” I replied. “This wine is primarily composed of Listán Negro featuring some light blending in French oak with other grapes native to the Spanish Canary Islands. Canary Island wines are fun because the terroir shows a lot of diversity due to how volcanic soil has affected the land development. In this Listán Negro, the grapes see prolonged maceration and minimal intervention and are finished in the French oak for 12 months. The result is a complex, but delicate wine with a lot of smoke on the nose, but a softer palate and enough tannic structure to feel well-rounded without being overwhelming.” Not the most astute explanation I could have come up with, but for a guy who doesn’t hang his hat on wine knowledge, I got my point across just in time to silently release the cork from the bottle which is exactly what I needed from myself.

It was at this moment that the incident occurred. The other man at the table, seizing the window of silence left by me not giving his friend an opportunity to mansplain wine to me, opened his mouth and uttered the three words that leave me beside my routine sensibilities in this environment that I’m generally so comfortable in. This man, who though seemingly close in age to me clearly has had a vastly different life experience, looked up at me and curled his lips to ask:

“Is it good?”

Is it good? Is that the unflinching metric by which you judge your daily experiences? Is it good? Fuck, man. I don’t know. Do the two-hundred year old vines produce a quality grape? Do the master winemakers at the vineyards contribute quality experience to the refinement of the juice into a wine that could be considered “good”? Ask yourself how dumb that question is. If you want to ask me if I personally enjoy this wine, that’s a question that, while wholly subjective and generally unhelpful, is at least not what I would consider a dumb question. What am I supposed to say in response to such an inquiry? Every time this question comes my way about anything in a restaurant I work in, I can’t help but think of every time in my memory that I’ve had to reckon with this strange, off putting question.

It happens somewhat often. I recall a man at another restaurant I worked at asking me to tell him about some popular items on the menu and, after describing in excruciating detail a monkfish dish that I was particularly fond of, he gave me a blank stare and asked - you guessed it - “is it good though?” Why did I pick this item to discuss at length with you if I didn’t think it was good? My man, you’re paying over a hundred dollars a head at a nationally acclaimed restaurant in a city with nothing but competition; do you not think that we can source fish well and cook it in a way that people enjoy?

Now maybe I’m misunderstanding; perhaps these people are asking me if they will think it’s good? Ah. So I’m now adding telepath to my resume. What business is it of mine to have kept up with your predilections so thoroughly throughout the course of your existence to know your tastes the way you expect me to? If I could look at someone and know without a doubt which item on a menu was best for them, I think I would be in possession of a skillset that could lend itself better to something more grandiose than waiting tables. I’ve mentioned this before, but I love the hospitality experience because serving others and making their Friday nights better is fulfilling for me - especially when I get to do so by talking to them about food and cocktails which is something I think I’ve made clear that I’m passionate about. I want to contribute to enriching someone’s experience at any restaurant that employs me. If there is a piece of knowledge or information that I possess that I can use to better someone’s experience, I want to use it. But it helps when the person you want to help is helping you help them. These lazy attempts at forcing me to make a decision for them are pointless, yet overall harmless on a good day, but annoying and borderline-insulting on most.

So, dear reader, if you take anything away from this rant, let it be this: everything is good to somebody. Don’t make an ass out of yourself by attempting to erode subjectivity just because you lack imagination. Take a chance, try something unfamiliar, and fucking live a little without needing to seek validation for your decisions. I’ll close here with a quote from someone who was way smarter and more articulate about this subject than I:

“Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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like a phoenix

Hey there; it’s been a while. One could say that it’s been a hell of a time since I last wrote something here. Just to play catch up for a minute, in the past six months, I got on Lexapro, went to DC, went to New York City, got in touch with my Judaism again, came home to an offer luring me back into the vocation of restaurant management that I had previously sworn off, got off Lexapro, lost touch with most of my friends, got on Wellbutrin, started talking to my mom again, went through an immense personal crisis regarding firing ghosting my therapist and struggling to navigate my personality in the light of the medication changes, got transferred to my old stomping grounds (as a manager this time), learned a lot about personal finance the hard way, went to Boston, went to Maine, and-most importantly-got engaged. In the midst of all of this, I lost all motivation to write. Watching my website collect dust has been tough on me since I worked really hard to establish writing regularly into my routine only to see it fall to the wayside for the umpteenth time in my life. But now, for reasons that I still don’t fully grasp, I’m finishing an exhausting Mother’s Day by sitting on my couch and writing on a whim.

In a previous post, I wrote this:
“Truth be told, I’ve actually written three articles to damn-near completion since my last post, but the chatter in my head has repeatedly shut down my efforts to take them to the point of posting until I just gave up at some point. Unfortunately, I’m really no stranger to this. Most of y’all probably don’t know this (and I’m cringing a little at the thought of there being anyone who does), but this is actually my fifth attempt at a consistent blog. I’ve tried to do this sort of thing many times and, without fail, life always gets in the way of my writing and creativity so I end up throwing in the towel time and time again. It wasn’t until this week that, when reflecting upon the disappointment I’ve been feeling about leaving my beloved blog to see no new activity, that it ever occurred to me that “life getting in the way” was likely not my primary issue in keeping any sort of consistency with this hobby of mine.”

If you haven’t yet ascertained that I maintain a less-than-subtle proclivity to start and stop writing in the pockets created by the ebbs and flows of my life by now, this post may not be for you. I wrote that exactly eight months ago, but it feels like I could have written it today. Though the sentiment remains the same, I find myself at odds with what was said if only for a lack of nuance (more accurately a refusal to dig deeper). I’ve now psychoanalyzed myself with sufficient thoroughness and with enough assistance from antidepressants to identify a more prevalent issue with my desire to make my voice heard through this medium:

I have to stop using writing as a crutch to lean on when I’m feeling insecure about my life in some capacity. I could point to several instances in which I began writing because I wanted to create a path for myself leading out of restaurant work or to receive the attention and validation of strangers that I so desperately desired because of an insecurity relating to a relationship or feeling of listlessness to reinforce this realization, but none of that would prove my clarity of mind on this subject the way that the last six months have. If there was ever a time in my life when the cacophony of instability relating to my career, my finances, my relationship, and my life as a whole would translate to my fingers clattering against a keyboard, this would have been it.

But instead, I made myself stop. I could feel myself struggling to articulate myself. I could feel myself grasping a little bit harder for something to fill my self-imposed weekly quota with. I could feel myself trying to be something I wasn’t and, instead of taking an ax to my budding body of work, I let it rest. Today happens to be the day when I wipe the crust out of my eyes and rise from hibernation, but with a vastly different intention this time around and I’m not planning on losing sight of who I’m doing this for.

So what’s next for the blog?

Whatever I want.

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