Stan Maron
Last Sunday I wrote about Aaron Bushnell, who took his own life in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Sally Chaffee, a dear friend for 50 years, responded the same day. She is one of the many women who worked closely with my mother, Norma, in Women for Racial and Economic Equality, which is how we met.
I knew Stan Maron, Sally’s partner for decades. He was a kindred spirit, a tall, broad-shouldered man with the gentle disposition of a puppy dog. He adored Sally. When they were in the same room or demonstration, he was either next to her or he was looking for her because he wanted to be next to her. Stan had been ill for some time, but I was still shocked when Sally told us in March 2024 that he had committed suicide.
Then Sally’s email last Sunday:
A week and a day after Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy, yelling “Free Palestine!” Stan took his life for “a Ceasefire in Gaza and wherever there is war and hostility.” He signed the note he left with the words of the sign he always carried at the Peace Vigil: “Live and Let Live!”
I don’t want Palestinians (or Israelis or anyone) to die so that a Jewish supremacist state can be a “villa in the jungle” (former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak) surrounded by an “iron wall” (fascist Jewish militia leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky) as “the outpost of civilization against barbarism” (Zionist movement founder Theodore Herzl) of “human animals” (former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant). I don’t want more Aaron Bushnells and Stan Marons.
Stan was a good person. May his memory be a blessing.
The limits of empathy
In a recent essay, Jonathan Kuttab, the executive director of the Friends of Sabeel North America, and a cofounder of both the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq and of Nonviolence International, defined empathy as “the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person, see things from their perspective, and be willing to apply to yourself the same standards you apply to others.” Empathy, Kuttab writes, “is lacking among most of the antagonists on the ground [in Palestine/Israel], but it is also equally lacking in many of their respective supporters abroad.”
Kuttab offers the example of the “frenzy of anguish and disgust” in Israel over the recent return by Hamas of the bodies of 9-month-old Ariel Bibas and 4-year-old Kfir Bibas, Israeli hostages who, along with their mother, were kidnapped on October 7. “Few [Palestinians] offered any heartfelt regret, apology, or understanding for the horror, anguish, and utter depravity of kidnapping innocent babies in the first place.”
He contrasts that with “the heart-wrenching story about seven Palestinian babies who died of hyperthermia [sic] in Gaza from the cold weather… Israeli (and especially U.S.) media failed to mention those babies and their deaths. Their names are not known, and their numbers are disputed (as Palestinian sources are continually treated with suspicion). Some popular Israeli social media accounts even mocked and gloated over their deaths.”
He concludes:
The point is not to show who suffered more, or even to pretend there is any symmetry between the two sides. Each and every death of these babies is a tragedy of immense dimensions.
This is not just a call for fairness, justice and equity. It is a basic need for the survival of all people. Whatever the past injustices or traumas experienced by anyone, the current reality is that 14 million people currently live in the Holy Land, roughly half of them Jewish and the other half Arab, and they seem destined to live together for the foreseeable future. They cannot however enjoy any kind of life if either of them thinks of the other as subhuman or illegitimate, as totally evil, vile creatures who need to be destroyed, denied equal rights, or physically eliminated.
I agree we need more empathy. But the lack of empathy Kuttab points to is not a personal failing to be corrected by introspection and difficult conversations. Lack of empathy is the inevitable result of the dehumanization of the Other. That dehumanization has a purpose — to justify the policies and actions of the class in power. Therefore, the lack of empathy has to be addressed in the context of the ideological struggle — in this case, against Zionism, antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian racism.
Further on, Kuttab writes, “Empathy begins the process of healing our traumas and forces us to think of new modalities of behavior that include the rights and humanity of others.” Such a formulation flattens the traumas experienced by both peoples — the Holocaust and the preceding centuries of antisemitic persecution were not caused by the Palestinians; the half century of ethnic cleansing and dispossession leading up to the (continuing) Nakba were caused by British colonialism, the Zionist movement, and the State of Israel and its allies.
Such a formulation also puts “empathy” before “the rights and humanity of others” and seems to elide the qualitative imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians.
After the Civil War, Black people didn’t wait for white Southerners to empathize with them; they demanded that the federal government use its power to create the conditions for the spread of Black Reconstruction. A similar process occurred 100 years later during the Civil Rights Movement. Black South Africans overthrew apartheid in 1994 at a time when most Whites had little empathy.
Just as it is not the responsibility of Palestinians to prove their humanity to Israelis as a condition for the latter’s empathy, so also it is not incumbent upon Palestinians to postpone their liberation until enough Israelis empathize with them and agree to dismantle their settler-colonial project. Palestinians have the right to be free now, not at a time of Israel’s choosing (if Israel were ever to choose such a time).