A Note About Support
By Mike Sarafa
Special to the Chaldean News
On October 13 at 11:50pm, we were to board a plane from JFK Airport in New York to Israel for a long-planned bucket-list trip to the Holy Land. Obviously, it didn’t happen.
The unprecipitated yet coldly calculated terrorist attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens, that also included Americans and other nationalities, has upended the fragile peace in the Middle East. Semi-neutral arbiters in the long simmering Palestinian - Israeli conflict have chosen sides—the United States lining up squarely and fully behind Israel—while countries like Egypt and Jordan, with their own peace treaties with Israel, are being forced to stand with the “Arab Street.”
The repercussions of this war will be felt for a long time. The U.S. and other countries have called for some restraint by Israel but have also basically green-lighted the dismantling of Hamas. There is no way for Israel to accomplish this without the near complete destruction of the Gaza strip and without causing massive casualties to the Palestinian people. There is human tragedy on all sides of this conflict.
I was able to attend a service at Temple Israel a couple Fridays ago along with about a dozen other representatives from Shenandoah. It is basic decency to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters and friends to roundly condemn what happened in Israel and how it happened. I also reached out to close friends and colleagues of mine that happen to be Jewish to express sorrow and sympathy at a personal level. For Jews all over the world, the fate of Israel is a deeply personal and existential matter.
Taking those steps was how I chose to respond to these heinous events. In addition, when asked by the heads of some Jewish organizations to release a statement or to add my name to a joint interfaith statement, I did so.
But I want to urge my Jewish friends and colleagues not to conflate what they perceive as “silence” by some as complicity. For example, I personally don’t use any social media unless you count LinkedIn. So most of what I described above about my own activities and feelings would be unknown to the larger public.
The vast majority of people, especially younger people, use social media for exactly what it says—social things. I think many Americans handle these types of events quietly, expressing their thoughts and sharing their opinions with those closest to them.
In opinion polls, it is clear that an overwhelming number of Americans stand with Israel and also support President Biden’s extremely strong stance for the same.
Individuals that represent organizations or large companies with thousands of employees may have a more public obligation to speak out, the way many have about LGBT rights or Black Lives Matter, for example. But these issues are domestic American policy matters. I’m not defending this but I’m also not sure it’s fair to be overly critical. It likely did not occur to many Americans that it might be important to be vocal and public in their views on this particular terrorist attack.
When ISIS was rampaging through the Christian villages of northern Iraq, destroying churches, cemeteries and attempting to wipe out Christianity in that part of the world, we really did not hear much support from people outside the Chaldean community. I’m not sure we really expected it either.
Most people possess a basic righteousness and will respond as such when nudged. But many people are also private or deliberately unaware about major world or political issues. Where and when this is the case, let us not consider it a moral failing, but rather an opportunity to educate our fellow citizens, to reach out across communities and cultures and to take solace in the innate humanity and humaneness in all of us.
This is a guest column and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Chaldean News.