I Know Who the Bad Guys Are

At the start of every semester, in the first week of launching our Greek unit, my students evaluate Alexander the Great’s leadership qualities. They read about his military prowess, his pragmatic promotion of racial equality, his murderousness, his love for his mother, his alcoholism, and that he thought he was a god. The purpose of the exercise is twofold. Not only do they amass a great deal of information about Alexander the Great, but they also come to the understanding that history is complicated, that no person in it is wholly good or wholly evil, that as much as they ask me, throughout the semester, whether it was Louis XIV or Robespierre or Napoleon who was really the bad guy, I will not have an answer for them. Because neither history nor good and evil are quite so accessibly decidable.

Yet, if school was still in session, and my students came to me and asked about the three Israeli teenagers (Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali) who were kidnapped by Hamas on Thursday on their way home from school and whose families are awaiting their return, I would have an answer. The bad guys are obvious.

Many seem undecided. The Germans are still trying to ascertain whether it is a kidnapping (one of the boys placed a call to the police saying he'd been kidnapped, you morons). The EU is keeping a careful feeble silence. The New York Times is upset that the “growing search for them [the boys] and their captors [will] further destabilize Israeli-Palestinian relations,” which would make perfect sense if it wasn’t the kidnapping itself that was causing the search—that’s like blaming firemen for dumping water on your house instead of the arsonists who lit the fire. Impeccable logic. Oh, how embarrassing to be American!

Interestingly, it’s the IDF’s own website that provided me with the most pause. They posted how Palestinians see kidnapping as their only strategy to seek the return of their relatives who sit in Israeli prisons and have celebrated the kidnapping by passing out candy. Now, let’s put to the side the fact that it’s representatives of Hamas, a terrorist organization that has as its stated purpose the destruction of Israel, in prison, and that three high school students, boys who never committed a crime against anyone, who have been kidnapped. The Palestinians in jail are somebody’s sons, somebody’s brothers, and they want them free. That makes sense. But instead of continuing with their hunger strike, instead of attracting world opinion to their cause, or working through legal channels, their answer is to kidnap other people’s sons, brothers, family. 

  

When I taught in Norway for a year, I spent a morning discussing capital punishment with two of my ninth grade Norwegian students. One of them lost several close friends in the shooting at Uttøya a month before. The other survived the shooting by hiding in a bathroom and mourned friends who had been there with her. They were both positive that killing Breivik, the shooter, would be a horrible thing to do. That it would somehow compound the evil of his massacre. Though he was evil, they would not become evil. The lesson they learned from their suffering was compassion. 

This is the same lesson that Jews who walked out of the gates of Auschwitz spread: Never Again, for anyone. This is the lesson we relive every Passover when we think back to our national formation and remember how we were slaves in Egypt—as we were oppressed, so shall we be compassionate. This is the lesson that terrorists count on to keep us from giving them what they deserve-- that we will use a disproportional restraint because of our memories of oppression and fears of being the oppressors. Every time I hear that Hamas leaders in Gaza have been arrested, a trickle of fear goes through me-- did our soldiers dehumanize them at all, and thus themselves? Did little children watch their fathers be arrested? Are they sure it was the right men --Hamas leaders-- they took to jail? Did they follow the IDF protocol of being attacked before they are allowed to shoot (what other army in the world would dream of that?!)? Even the photos of Palestinians eating candy to celebrate our boys' kidnapping cannot erase these thoughts from my mind, and right now, I oughtn't to have the luxury of compassion for them-- I ought only to have prayer for our boys. But compassion remains because it is not, in fact, a luxury. It is a necessity.

Students of mine, I cannot teach you about this event next year. It will not be in our contemporary unit, because I cannot teach this without bias. I can let you make up your own minds about whether Alexander the Great was great and whether the Industrial Revolution had more pros than cons, but not this. Right now, in this day and age, the kidnappers of three innocent high school boys are the bad guys. Those who take their own misery and try to spread and multiply it, to share it among the innocent, are evil. If freshman high school students who have survived a terrorist attack in Norway can figure that out, so can Palestinian adults. The lesson of morality, of taking one's struggles and using them to become a better person, are what makes us human. 

Students of mine, I know who the bad guys are. And I'm so frightened. Because three high school students, just your age, are in their grasp. So as I sit in the school media center, planning your curriculum for next year and hitting refresh on Haaretz every thirty seconds, all I can think about is the one message I want you to learn: It doesn't matter one whit whether Alexander the Great loved his mama or killed his own men. What matters is that you are the good guys. That you become able to take your hardships (and life has dealt you a deep stack of hot mess, I know) and turn them into compassion; that you take your struggles and use them as a moral compass. Be the good guys. Be the good guys. 

Please, if you pray, pray for these boys: Yaakov Naftali ben Rachel Devorah, Gilad Michael ben Bat Galim, and Eyal ben Irim Teshurah.