The same question has been directed at me repeatedly over the last few weeks. Slightly differently worded each time, but with the same voice and movement in it, on every post that deals with Jews.
"How can you defend Israel's actions in Gaza?"
And I've answered briefly, I've answered quickly, and I've perhaps answered poorly, because I answered the question instead of what lay beneath it.
So let me do it properly.
From where I stand, I'm not defending a war. Certainly not one I'm not part of, have no responsibility for, and have not the slightest influence on. I'm not Jewish. I don't lead any country. I sit in Denmark and write - and that's exactly as much as I am.
Criticism of states is fine with me, by the way. Criticism of governments, armies, institutions, ministries and power holders is not just permitted, it's necessary - and most of them, including here in this country, have deserved far more of it than they ever get. Israel's government is not exempt. No government is exempt. That's the whole reason we have language.
And I know the answer. "It's not Jews we have a problem with, it's Zionists". It's a word that's narrow when you're asked, and broad when it's used, and what it means in practice, I'll write separately about - but I'm aware of this attempt through language to split the two.
But what's happening right now is not that.
What's happening is that people take the individual Jew, regardless of where he lives, what she works with, what they believe, who they vote for, and completely regardless of what they may or may not think about that war, and make that person complicit in what's happening in the Gaza Strip. Not because they've done anything. But because they are something.
In my eyes, there isn't a single viable position from which that's acceptable.
Because if that's acceptable - then it's acceptable all the way around, and then the alternative is that we all, right now, at once, go for each other's throats, because our belonging to something or other - which someone finds unacceptable - makes us complicit in grave crimes.
And it does. Because we all belong to something. You too.
So the question isn't whether you think it's unfortunate for the Jews. The question is whether you mean the principle.
Should you be punished for something someone you're related to has done? Should you be liable for what someone you share a group with did, while you sat somewhere completely different in the world and had no idea? Will you accept that we come after you with pitchforks, train cars and labour camps because of what Mette Frederiksen has done on Denmark's behalf? Or what Anders Fogh did in the noughties? Or what a king came up with four hundred years ago in a war against the Germans?
I assume the answer is no. Otherwise you need to be examined.
The situation in Gaza is unfortunate, and there's nothing to sugarcoat there. And if war crimes are being committed, and they are almost state-guaranteed, wherever humans are at war, solely because of war's nature and what it does to us, then it should be investigated and punished by a court. All the way to the top, if that's where it ends. On both sides.
But let me turn it around, so everyone can rejoice that I'm not a state leader.
My position is also like this -
Imagine if men had come here. Ignited by a holy fire from a sect in Germany or in Malmö. Men who every single day for forty some years had publicly and internationally called for the extermination of Denmark and the Danes, for "cleansing everything from the North Sea to the Øresund", and whom no one had really taken seriously, because you don't mean that sort of thing literally.
And imagine then, that they came one morning.
That they in a single day mutilated, raped, maimed, burned and murdered twelve hundred of your and my free sisters and brothers and their children and grandparents. Your family.
To then take hundreds with them back and hide them away to torture, rape and degrade further - and use them to negotiate with...
I write the next, not to shock, but because it's documented, and because precisely this has been turned into something people discuss as if it were a claim someone made up.
The UN's Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict found reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape were committed at at least three of the crime scenes, and clear and convincing information that hostages were subjected to rape and sexualised torture in captivity. The mission found a pattern of victims, predominantly women, who were found completely or partially undressed, bound and shot, in several places. Most were killed during or immediately after the assault. There was laughter during it, survivors say, who lay listening to it, and they describe how the screams - after they were finished sharing the women among themselves - stopped with a single shot, and how the relief at that silence is what they can't get rid of again. The UN itself writes that the full extent will probably never be known.
This is not war running wild along the way.
That was the purpose of going!
I'll repeat that sentence -
That was the purpose of going!
If this happened in Denmark - and I sat at the head of the table.
There would be NO peace.
And no prospect of any.
Not until those men either laid down, disarmed, gave up, released every single hostage and accepted trial before an international court - OR there wasn't a single remnant left of them in this world, so they could do it again.
Those would be the two choices.
Hard against hard.
And everyone who stood in between would know that risk beforehand.
Choose!
Others can easily feel differently, and I can read several of you do.
That's how "Mr. It'll Work Out" and "Mrs. We All Have to Be Here," are, and they're fine with it, right up until it's them and theirs it happens to.
That's the answer to what I would do, if it were MY country and MY dead. OUR people. Yours and mine. I haven't answered whether Israel is doing it right, because I don't know - and it's not mine to decide either.
What is mine is the other thing. The thing with the neighbour. The thing with the man who has never set foot in Israel, and who's told he's liable. Persecution of the innocent.
Because Guilt CANNOT be inherited, and the day we let it be, we no longer have language to explain what we meant by "never again".
And I mean it with "never again".
STOP stoking it.
Because we know where this ends, if it takes off again.
❤️🔥🪽