For the dead on both sides, it is time to stop

Jewish Melburnians held a vigil in support of a ceasefire in Gaza last night. MICHELLE LESH delivered this speech.

I hesitate to speak. Who am I to do it? I’ve not experienced what Israelis have. Obviously, I cannot speak for Palestinians who continue to suffer unspeakable horrors. I am an Israeli citizen, though I was born and live in Australia, but I speak as a Jew. I do this because more than Israel’s other wars against Gaza this is a Jewish war, fought in the name of Jews against the hatred shown in the crimes against them on October 7 with macabre enthusiasm. It reignited inter-generational trauma in Jews world over.

Like many, I am deeply and acutely pained by the atrocities perpetrated on October 7 and the war that followed. The pain is not the same for everyone and the perspective from which people see the war is not the same. Part of the distress about the debate that has accompanied it is that there is very limited space to hold more than one fear, to call out more than one wrong, to make room for qualifications and time to reflect. For those reasons, most people prefer to have conversations in private about the horrors of asymmetrical warfare that have entered unprecedented moral and legal terrain.

The reaction of many Jews cannot be disentangled from the latent antisemitism that has risen to the surface, sometimes viciously as early as October 9 and increasingly since then. I understand why Israelis, typical of any nation during war, do not welcome condemnation or counsel from friend or foe. Understandably they believe that outsiders do not appreciate the nuances of their national ethos and trauma, or what it really feels like to become a pariah state reeling from the brutality of the October 7 massacre whose scars may be permanent.