In this short text, originally published in the New York Times, Israeli writer Etgar Keret discusses the rift that war has created in his society, to the point of making communication impossible.
Most Saturday evenings, my wife and I join a silent vigil in Tel Aviv where each participant holds a photograph of a Gazan child killed in recent Israel Defense Forces attacks. There are a lot of them. We stand for an hour.
Some passers-by stop to look at the pictures and read the children’s names; others throw out a curse and keep walking. Strangely, unlike at many antigovernment protests I attend, where I feel a bit pointless, at this vigil I do feel of some use. It’s not much, but I am creating an encounter between a dead child and the gaze of a person who didn’t know that child existed.
On a recent Saturday, the vigil was more charged than usual. Hamas had just released a monstrous video showing the skeletal Israeli hostage Evyatar David digging his own grave upon his captors’ orders. A few people stopped as they walked past us. A man wearing swim shorts stared at me and asked me if I had seen the video: “He’s your people. It’s his picture you should be holding. His!” Another woman stopped and yelled at us: “It’s all Hamas propaganda! Don’t you get it? Those kids — it’s all A.I. They’re not real!”
It would have been easy for me to argue, to find myself condescending to these people’s claims. But because the vigil is silent, I was forced to just look at them and keep quiet. I’ve never been very good at keeping quiet. In some ways I’m like the running commentary on a director’s cut, with an answer or explanation for everything. I used to feel like the only one who did that, but now that social media is everywhere, it seems the whole world has become like me.
The man in the swim shorts tried to get a verbal response out of me, and when he failed, he quickly recalibrated and realized he could keep talking unhindered. His attempt to stir up an argument soon turned into a peculiar blend of internal monologue and Facebook post. He spoke about loss, and enemies, and this country of ours and what the hell has become of it, and about the hostages and his reserve duty and his nephew who’s serving in Gaza.
What he said led me to believe that the two of us had some things in common: We both think the government is a disgrace, we’ve both lost someone and something of ourselves in the past 22 months. It’s just that I’m holding a picture of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli soldiers, and the way he sees it, that is an act that has no possible explanation or meaning. It doesn’t even have a name.
All of a sudden the whole scenario seemed less like a political dispute and more like a modern Tower of Babel, where God made everyone speak different languages to stop their effort to build endlessly upward, a check on human arrogance. It’s a story in which we are all living in a building, trying to reach the clouds. It keeps growing and growing, and we keep climbing up with it, higher and higher: with more knowledge, more confidence, more purpose, yet somewhere along the way — and not just because of arrogance — we lose our fundamental ability to communicate. Each of us is trapped in our separate feeds, our separate languages, with different facts and different conclusions, which grow only more and more solid. When we stop looking at the tower’s walls and instead look into one another’s eyes, we see something completely foreign.
At the end of the biblical story, the people abandon their project to build the tower. Many stories in the Bible end badly, and ours seems to be heading that way, too. That is, unless we can manage — me, the guy in the swim shorts and everyone else — to find a common language again, a language that has a name for everything, even for a person holding a photograph of a dead child.
Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer whose latest work, AutoCorrect, is a collection of short stories. He writes a weekly column called “Alphabet Soup” on the Substack platform.
