This weekend brought new, terrible images: a dazed, wounded man walking methodically down a street in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, cradling a dismembered arm in his arm, holding the blackened hand with his other hand; the shredded remains of the 20-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad in a small, blue plastic bag; an almost biblical tower of fire stretching skyward from the southern suburbs of Beirut. I receive these images while walking my dog in the park, waiting for my laundry in the dryer. I am drawn back, once again, to Palestinian American writer Sarah Aziza’s intervention—collected below with four other pieces published in Jewish Currentsover the last year—regarding the limitations of this witnessing: “We are saturated with this knowing, now. If we never saw another photograph, our purpose would still be clear. This week’s photographed corpses should have been saved by last week’s ceasefire; the same will be said every week until this evil ends.” This was written in January, 38 weeks of images—of lives—ago.

“The world we sanction is the world we get,” the Palestinian American poet Hala Alyan wrote today. What Americans have sanctioned is, as Alyan writes, “a year of war criminals lecturing on victimhood, of bombed evacuation routes, shredded babies, mass graves,” funded to the tune of a record $18 billion just this year alone. To reject such a world, many of us have tried marches, pickets, boycotts, and direct action; working within the system and without. The bravest among us have resorted to sabotage. Nothing stops the machinery of death, and everywhere a kind of nihilism vibrates on the edges, threatening to devour all like a black hole. We see it in the outsized divisions within our movements, in their lack of clear direction, and in the retreat from struggle that takes hold amidst failure to make change. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes, from nihilism comes the belief “not only that everything deserves to perish,” but the desire to destroy. And why not? In a description that resonates, philosopher Stanley Rosen describes Nietzschian nihilism as “the situation which obtains when ‘everything is permitted.’ If everything is permitted, then it makes no difference what we do, and so nothing is worth anything.”

In left Jewish communities, this crisis of meaning—in humanity, in institutions, in language—is compounded by a crisis within Jewish identity. Today, many in Israel, and in Jewish communities around the world, attempt to commemorate those killed in the October 7^th attack in isolation from Israel’s ongoing mass killing of Palestinian and Lebanese people. In the Guardian, Naomi Klein details the myriad ways that October 7^th has been memorialized with the intent not to heal, but to retraumatize—or to spread the trauma to the diaspora like a virus, creating an identification with the Israeli victim that can be used as justification for limitless Israeli force. Klein speaks of memorialization, not mourning; she delineates the ways in which these diverge, with the former intentionally crowding out the latter. Indeed, for all the criticism directed toward the left broadly—and Jewish leftists, in particular—for not mourning 10/7 sufficiently, it seems clear that Jewish society writ large has, over the last year, demonstrated a failure to mourn. How else to explain the sacrifice of the hostages on the altar of vengeance? To account for the insistence on 10/7’s continuity with the Holocaust even as Jews hold opposite positions in regards to state power? To understand the continued appetite for violence, without the slightest pretense of an endgame, or the insistence on ignoring the warnings of history, which telegraph that military responses to Palestinians’ desire for national liberation will only breed more violent resistance? I see this refusal to adequately grieve disfiguring family and friends, making them hypervigilant to the point of paranoia, solipsistic instead of vulnerable, disconnected from the pain of others. In 2021, amid the penultimate Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I wrote: “Jewishness must mean justice for the Palestinian people or nothing at all. If it is to be drained of meaning, then I will be, too, for a time, and will have to rebuild myself on sand.” Here I am now, witnessing the total destruction of Gaza, the siphoning of meaning from every place where it was collected, sand up to my shins and struggling to find a firm step.

And yet, Nietzsche does not see such nihilism, as destructive as it is, as an endpoint, but rather as a period of transition, “the darkest night before the dawn,” where the illusions that sustained us until this point evaporate, and we must contend with what is. Though humanity’s recovery from nihilism is far from assured, he writes, “I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism’s] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity.” He distinguishes passive nihilism, characterized by withdrawal and retreat, from active nihilism, characterized by a freedom to destroy and create anew, to reinvest meaning without false, residual attachments. As contributing editor Dylan Saba wrote in Protean Magazine, “If the Palestinian struggle is one for liberation, then, it is a struggle to destroy the world, to break the sentence into fragments, to break open the earth too, and to build from these shards of language and land a bridge to the future: a new world, with new meanings—new structures, expressed through new events.” We cannot raise the dead, we cannot repair what has been obliterated, but we may still take from this leveling a clear vantage point, a ground prepared for the next world. What will exist going forward is what we create.

– Arielle Angel
Editor-in-chief