Reflections on a dark year

And a new definition for naivety

Dear Friend,

I hope you are well and taking care. 

The world can feel very hostile and dark at the moment, and when I write that I am thinking about a lot of things, but of course the nightmarish and seemingly ever-escalating conflict in the Middle East. Like many people, I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about what’s happening there, and despairing about it. Anyone watching the suffering can only wish for an immediate end to the violence and eventually, somehow, a pathway to peace.

As a Jewish(ish) person with family in Israel, I find it’s not always been easy in the last year to find a place in conversation with non-Jewish friends on the subject. Not because my reactions differ greatly from theirs, but because there are elements of the discourse surrounding the conflict, in particular online, that can feel existentially frightening in a way they might not understand.

It can be hard to explain to non-Jewish friends that there is a difference between the likes of Netanyahu using a vague concept of antisemitism as a way to shut down any criticism of his far-right government — versus the real and millennia-old Jew-hatred that is a fluctuating but eternal fact and has been amplified by the global focus on this conflict. 

Western leaders are also part of this practice of conflation between the precise geopolitical present and vague, unhelpful evocations of antisemitism. This not only doesn’t serve or represent Jewish people, but is also intellectually cowardly when the reasons for America, France and the UK supporting Israel militarily have little to do with a love of Jewish people, and much to do with a strategic position against the Iranian regime.

The scant hope I can find, a year on from October 7, comes from reading about the work of organisations fighting for equality, freedom and a road to peace in the region. Coalitions like these seem to be ever scarcer, and their work is often much less amplified than voices that reinforce the logic of Netanyahu’s reckless solipsism, or Sinwar’s fanatical brutality.

But what a relief for the human heart to read about organisations like Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun (how absent the voice of women has been from this bellicose scene), made up of Arab and Jewish women. They have made a joint pledge called the Mothers’ Call, which they proclaimed at an event on October 4th 2023. Here is its introduction:

“We, Palestinian and Israeli women from all walks of life, are united in the human desire for a future of peace, freedom, equality, rights, and security for our children and the next generations.”

Shortly after this event, one of the founders of Women Wage Peace and two other members were killed on October 7, while 27 members of Women of the Sun have been killed in Gaza in the year since. Many members of both these organisations had already lost family to the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict and can still somehow envision something different to the current hell. The organisations are jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

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I became a teenager in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that shocked the world, which were followed by the invasion of the American and British armies in Afghanistan and Iraq. My personal politics developed in this context and when I was 12 I wrote a letter to Tony Blair with seven reasons the UK should not join the invasion in Iraq. For many people in my generation, the decision for the government to do so despite protest marred our view of politics for decades to come.

In my early teen years that followed, I became very interested in Sixties counter-culture (I was probably just as insufferable as that sentence makes me sound), my bedroom wall covered in Bob Dylan posters, Joan Baez album covers and ‘Give Peace a Chance’ slogans. Even then, the idea of talking about peace was retro, and it’s a discourse that sounds even more so now.

Another peace organisation I follow called Standing Together, ‘a progressive grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice’, released a statement today talking about the last year, and the real meaning of naivety.

“For as long as we can remember, people who called for peace and non-violence were considered “naïve,” stupid, or even traitors. If the past year has taught us anything - it is that there is nothing more naïve than believing that this cycle of bloodshed and wars is sustainable. There is nothing more naïve than believing that the path we have been on until now is a path we should stay on.

The truth is that on this land live millions of Palestinians and millions of Jews, and nobody is going anywhere. Working toward a sustainable peace that guarantees everyone freedom, safety, equality and independence is imperative for anyone in this land who wants to see a future here. The fates of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, are tied. So no, we are not naïve, and you are not either. 

In the face of decades of bloodshed and a year of unfathomable violence and destruction, we are insisting on Jewish-Palestinian solidarity, and insisting on calling an end to the bloodshed once and for all. We are calling on our society to fight for life, in the face of our leadership that only speaks of death. We are calling on everyone around the world to pick a side - but for that side not to be Israelis or Palestinians - for the side to be all of us, the Israeli and Palestinian people on the ground who all deserve a real future, against our leaderships that are only dragging us further into the abyss.” — Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, National Co-Directors of Standing Together

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Thirty-second book club

I have been on a novel-reading spree. First I read Fleishman is in Trouble, a best-seller when it came out a few years ago, that compellingly and sharply dissects a section of upper-middle-class New York society. The world they inhabit, despite being held up to many of us in popular culture as the ultimate aspiration, seems often hollow, lonely and unappealing. The author Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s decision to have a female character narrate the interiority of a male character, who is himself making presumptions about the interiority of a female character, his wife, also makes us the reader in turn question our own assumptions.

After that, I read Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty (don’t ever say I’m not down with the times). Anyone who regularly reads these letters will know about my reverence for Smith’s brain and writing, a reverence which was topped up recently by a new interview with her on the New York Times news podcast The Ezra Klein Show. Klein, like Smith, is a possessor of a HUGE BRAIN – though I’d say a tad more prone to over-verboseness and waffling than our gal. Her thoughts are intellectually nourishing, as ever. After I listened I picked up this early noughties novel that had been sitting idly on my shelf. It tells the story of two intellectual families: the Belseys, living in the academic East Coast of America, composed of a white English academic father, African American hospital administrator mother and their three adolescent/young adult children; and the Kipps’, a Caribbean-British intellectual  family living in London with two young adult children. The Belseys are lefty, liberal and – with the exception of one son – secular; the Kipps’ are deeply conservative and Christian. Among exploring themes of the family, human weakness, hypocrisy and the meaning of a life well lived, especially for women, the novel dissects what we certainly today would call ‘the culture war’. A lover of the long Victorian novel, Smith allows the story to unfold at its own pace, and there are several deliberate parallels with Howards’s End, the 1910 novel by E.M Forster, which also uses the intertwined story of two families as a vehicle to explore the difference between two kinds of elites, in the case of Forster’s novel, liberal bohemians and industry-loving conservatives. In common with Fleishman, the male protagonist, Howard Belsey is a precariously likeable moral underachiever. It’s an entertaining read. Twenty years on it now also has a certain retro appeal – where academic arguments and ‘cancel culture’ all take place in faculty meetings, magazines and emails, rather than on Twitter. Quaint!

After that I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society written by Mary Ann Shaffer and finished by her niece Annie Barrows, an epistolary novel set during the Second World War when the Channel Island was occupied by the German Army. A few months ago I travelled to Guernsey for an article, as I wrote about in these letters, and many people recommended this book to me. When I found it in a charity shop in Wales a few weeks ago, I immediately snapped it up. It revolves around a fictional but plausible society of misfits and old friends during the War, and a London-based journalist who finds out about them and goes to live among them after the occupation so she can tell their story. The longer she stays, the more she is drawn into their sweet circle of unlikely friendship, until it begins to feel more real than her life of glamour on the mainland. It’s so delightful to read that I got through it in one train journey. A treat of a book. 

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Thank you for reading this edition of Pen Friend. If this is your first letter from me, then you can know that the subject matter is not usually as serious as it has been today. 

I was delighted to see so many people engaging with the wonderful writing of my friend Ellen after her guest PFF letter last time about her experience as a Dubliner in Paris, and then in Dublin again. She is very clever – thank you so much Ellen for writing. 

I have another guest letter from another very smart friend, Myriam, coming in the next few weeks. With her sisters she produces the newsletter

Les Soeurcières

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Here are some beautiful words she wrote this week:

FR: “Je ne sais pas pour vous, mais l’atmosphère est lourde. A chaque moment, on guette les mauvaises nouvelles.

Une chose qui permet de faire éclater quelques bulles de légereté : c’est la joie. 

La joie de se rassembler avec des êtres chers, la joie quand on fait des petites choses simples du quotidien. La joie quand on a finalement du temps libre pour ne rien faire aussi alors que ça n’était pas prévu. La joie comme un acte de résistance. Voilà notre cercle de contrôle. Cultiver et pratiquer la joie. Car ça n’est pas quelque chose que l’on a de façon naturelle. La joie est une orchidée dans nos coeurs, nos vies. On la met sous socle et on y veille chaque jour. On lui met la quantité d’eau, de lumière et de paroles positives dont elle a besoin pour se maintenir et pour grandir. 

La joie est pleine d’empathie, elle accueille aussi les émotions tristes. Mais elle reste là ancrée, car chez vous c’est chez elle et on ne quitte pas sa maison comme cela.” 

EN: “I don’t know about you, but the atmosphere feels is heavy. Every moment we are waiting to receive more bad news. 

One thing that allows us to let a few bubbles of lightness to form, is joy. 

The joy of gathering with people dear to us, the joy when we do simple everyday things. The joy when we unexpectedly have free time to do nothing. The joy as an act of resistance. Voilà, what lies within our circle of control. Cultivate and practice joy. Because it is not something we have naturally. Joy is an orchid in our hearts and our lives. We plant it and we watch over it every day. We give it the water, light and positive words that it needs to sustain itself and grow. 

Joy is full of empathy, she also welcomes sad emotions. But she stays there, anchored, because where you live is where she lives, and she won’t leave you.”

I have added some songs to my Pen Friend mixtape here, and some I think capture this feeling of sadness enclosed by joy. Please have a listen if you feel your soul is in need of soothing.

That’s all for now. Have a good week. 

Yours, 

Hannah