Why do I keep crying about Gaza?
I’ve been feeling a lot—grief, fear, horror, anger. Why though? I'm not Arab or a Jew.
I’ve been trying to find my way into what’s happening in Israel and Gaza. I’ve been feeling a lot—grief, fear, horror, anger. But it’s been hard to fully understand why Jews, Palestinians, and others are reacting in the ways they are. Mostly, I want to figure out why I keep tearing up seemingly out of nowhere.
I guess one way to approach the tears in my eyes is to look at the history of my people.
As the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön says, “Start where you are.”
By “my people,” I don’t mean Americans or even my immediate family. For most white people, that’s all we know about belonging to something larger than ourselves. Stars and stripes, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Our parents, grandparents, and maybe—if we’re lucky—stories passed down from two or three generations back.
What I mean are the Europeans who migrated to what I now call home. Some directed the genocide of Indigenous people and the stealing of their land. Many did not. Many were coerced, manipulated, or outright forced to leave their homeland by war, poverty, and the economic destruction caused by the early days of capitalism.
Many came to this “new” land holding tightly to customs, traditions, and ways of living that had served them and their ancestors for millennia. Scottish herdsman danced around fires to celebrate the start of spring. German medicine women used herbs to alleviate the pain of childbirth (until they were burned at the stake for being “witches”). Irish peasants ended the harvest season by ritually offering food to long-dead ancestors, then giving that food away to the less well off.
Over time, these deep roots and connections to the past were pulled from their hands by the rich and powerful and replaced with something new, the idea of a “white” race.
The “white” race was a recent invention.
White people didn’t exist until the late 17th century. Before then, they were considered English, Irish, German, or wherever they came from. But after poor Europeans began joining with enslaved Africans and Indigenous people to fight back against the rich, the rich made laws to divide and control this multiracial working class. The rich wanted poor and indentured Europeans to feel like they were better and special, so they gave them slight legal advantages. One example was the banishment of whipping any “Christian white servant while naked without an order from the justice of the peace.” They wanted poor whites to aim their justifiable rage about inequality toward people below them in the new pecking order, rather than up at them. Whiteness became what W.E.B. DuBois called a “psychological wage.” Today, we call this privilege.
Through researching my ancestors, I’ve stumbled on the story of Hans and Anna Weber. The Webers fled war-torn Germany in 1708. They had been wine grape farmers along the southern stretch of the Rhine River, at the time one of the most religiously diverse regions of western Europe. From what I can tell, they had likely been serfs, under the control of a feudal landowner. They had survived decades of war being waged around them. Their towns and farms had been occupied and destroyed again and again. Their taxes had been raised to fund the military conquests of the princes that ruled them. They had also outlived a plague that had wiped out large swathes of the local population.
The Webers had been attracted to the words of a Lutheran leader promising free land and a better life in “English America.” They followed him first to England, where immigrants—particularly Protestants—were increasingly unwelcome. They lived as refugees for a time on the outskirts of London, begging Queen Anne for help. They were fortunate that the English needed cheap labor—and in the words of the English government, “more white people”—across the Atlantic. In exchange for working off their debts, they were shipped to the British North American colonies and eventually given a plot of land in what is now Newburgh, New York.
This story exemplifies the complex and conflicting family histories of white Americans. My ancestors were given land that eventually they would own outright. They also survived great terror and devastation, which had all but forced them to leave their homeland. Once in the colonies, their traditions and ways of life were slowly taken from them and replaced with the individualism of capitalism and the shallow protection of whiteness.
What was passed down to me from my ancestors?
Recently, I learned that it takes four generations of monarch butterflies to complete their annual migration. In the summer, each generation travels a little further north than the last, lays eggs, and then dies. The last generation of the year travels south for the winter to a small collection of mountains in Mexico. Somehow all of them know where to fly, even landing on the same trees their ancestors did on past journeys.
This reminds me of something I learned while studying to become a therapist, that research is revealing more evidence of trauma being passed down through generations. In a groundbreaking study, children of women who were pregnant and lived in New York City during the 9/11 attacks were found to have much higher odds of experiencing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) themselves. There is more research to be done, but scientists say that it’s clear that some aspects of trauma can be inherited.
Ahhh, now I’m getting to the tears. What trauma was passed down to me from my European ancestors? What ways of living and loving and connecting with each other were lost along the way? Why do I feel so unsettled and at times tremendously lonely, despite my relative privilege as a white person? Who and where are my people?
I don’t and likely won’t ever know the exact answers to these questions. But I do know that I feel kinship with Palestinians hiding from bombs in Gaza and Jews around the world terrified of anti-Semitism. Especially thsoe with little control over their lives, their jobs, their communities. Somewhere, deep in my bones, I know what it must be like to feel like you don’t have a home—like you aren’t safe anywhere.
Now, what to do with these feelings? I’m taking my cues from Jewish friends and public figures who stand against the attack on Palestinians, and who see the Israeli government as committing apartheid and genocide.
“The violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence,” writes Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel. She continues:
“As Israelis count their dead, politicians in Israel and the US call for Palestinian blood in direct, genocidal language. This language deploys the bombs that fall on Gazans from the sky, leveling whole neighborhoods, wiping out families without warning, huddled in their homes because they have nowhere to flee. Jewish grief is routed back into the violence of a merciless system of Palestinian subjugation that reigns from the river to the sea. It is mobilized by US politicians who support Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government, which has intensified Palestinian death and displacement and disappeared any hope of a diplomatic solution. We can’t let our grief be bent to these purposes, but it’s not clear where else to put it.”
I don’t know where to put my grief either, other than to write these words. Other than to call my representatives and demand a ceasefire. Other than to try to get to a protest against my government’s support for the Israeli government. I'm not sure what else I can do, especially while living in a society that works way too many hours and has little time for rest let alone protest.
But at least I now know why I’m feeling all these feelings, and that gives me the slightest shred of steadiness in an otherwise trembling world.
Now, a question for the comments below (or email me: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog): How are you feeling about Israel and Gaza?
I thought this would be a better article than some you've put out but I stopped reading after I realized you just want to use this space to talk about being white. Why would you make a post regarding a situation that is hurting tons of Arabs and Jews about your own Anglo Saxon heritage? Sure your personal generational trauma is bad which I know because I probably had more as a 2nd gen POC woman immigrant ... But yours and even mine is not like what is going on in the middle east right now. This is like that cringe CEO that posted himself crying on LinkedIn after choosing to fire his employees despite putting down a payment for his house.