Three weeks ago, as I was watching television coverage of the anniversary of a Lebanese political figure’s assassination during the civil war, I heard someone pay tribute to the martyrs who had “given their blood to the Lebanese cause.” What a familiar sentence, I thought. Threadbare, even. I’ve been hearing versions of it all my life, from every side of our political spectrum. Usually, the words pass from memory as soon as the occasion has passed. This time, one stayed behind with me: “Given.”
Among those memorialized were civilians who had not actively participated in the war. One of them was my cousin Wassim, who was studying for his midterm exams when a bomb tore him from my aunt’s living room. Had Wassim given his blood that day, or had it been taken from him? I found myself imagining the dead interrupting the broadcast. What would they call themselves if they could speak? Some would undoubtedly embrace the title of martyr. Others might ask who had enrolled them in a cause they had never chosen. Who could presume to answer for them all? More frustratingly, what did the person praising their offering stand to lose? There was something troubling about this generosity exercised with other people’s lives. Before we call a death a sacrifice, shouldn’t we ask who made the offering?
I kept thinking about that verb as the anniversary of October 7 approached. Those murdered by Hamas and other attackers did not give their lives. They were killed. Those abducted did not surrender their freedom to a historical mission. They were taken hostage. It should be possible to say this without immediately putting their suffering to work. It should be possible to remember that — before they became photographs, demands, arguments, or votes — they were people whose lives had purposes of their own. They were doing something that morning. They had somewhere to go afterward.
The future did not belong to whoever would later claim to speak in their names. Nor did their deaths give Israel permission to inflict devastation on Palestinian civilians. Netanyahu’s government invoked October 7 to justify the unjustifiable, as though the atrocity committed against its people could authorize atrocities against another. A cynical political analyst might say that Netanyahu found a political use for the catastrophe he had failed to prevent. I am interested in what that sentence costs: how the suffering of citizens becomes an asset in the hands of those who owed them protection.
But suffering rarely remains unemployed in the hands of power. It becomes political currency, traded for obedience, electoral advantage, international support, permission to continue a war. A death becomes an argument. A photograph becomes a mandate. Eventually, we are told what the victims demand, though the voice making the demand belongs to someone still alive. And if a grieving family challenges that voice? If it wants a different decision, a different priority, a different way of honoring its loss? Its grief may suddenly become inconvenient to the very people who have been invoking it. The dead are made to pay twice: first with their lives, then with the uses to which their deaths are put.
I am not speaking here of families demanding justice. They have every right to insist that the world acknowledge what happened. I am speaking of the moment someone else turns their loss into authorization.
Palestinians have the right to freedom, dignity, and self-determination. Hamas does not own those rights. It cannot invoke them as a license to decide how much devastation Palestinians must endure, nor can it exploit them to make loyalty to Palestine synonymous with obedience to itself. Killing Israeli civilians and taking hostages did not become legitimate because the perpetrators spoke of liberation. Nor did living in Gaza make Palestinian civilians willing participants in those crimes. Israel remains responsible for the violence its forces inflict. That responsibility cannot be transferred to Hamas whenever it becomes uncomfortable to acknowledge, any more than Hamas can transfer responsibility for its own actions to Israel.
Yet somewhere beneath these competing claims is a parent trying to keep a child alive. What does that parent owe the men speaking of historic victory? Enthusiasm? Gratitude for the opportunity to endure? Hunger does not become conviction because someone calls it steadfastness. A person searching for food is not necessarily demonstrating faith in a movement. Perhaps that person is simply searching for food. We should allow this ordinary fact to retain its enormous weight. The wish to survive is part of what freedom must make possible. What kind of liberation demands that people surrender the right to question its price?
In Lebanon, I know how quickly that question becomes an accusation. Hezbollah opened a front against Israel after October 7, and people who had no say in the decision found their lives exposed to its consequences. We were told of solidarity, duty, resistance. But a village is not a contribution a commander can pledge. Someone lives there. Someone has spent years paying for a house, growing trees, keeping a business open through one collapse after another. What authority allows an armed party to commit all this on their behalf? And why must Lebanese citizens who question that decision have to defend their loyalty to their country, while those who made the decision are permitted to define what loyalty means?
I refuse that arrangement. Solidarity with Palestinians does not require surrendering Lebanese lives to Hezbollah’s judgment. Nor does rejecting Hezbollah diminish Israel’s responsibility for its attacks and the suffering they cause. What troubles me, too, is the ceremony afterward: destruction renamed endurance, survival renamed resilience, bereavement renamed honor. Even displacement can be entered into the movement’s account as proof of devotion. But the person fleeing a bombardment has decided to survive. Nobody may convert that decision into consent.
Israelis, too, have the right to question what is demanded in their name. After October 7, the need for protection was painfully real. So was a government’s obligation to seek the return of those abducted. Precisely because those obligations matter, the decisions made to fulfill them must remain open to scrutiny. Which decisions protect lives, and which expose them to further danger? What objectives justify sending soldiers into battle, and who answers when those objectives change or remain out of reach? An elected government has an authority an armed movement does not. It also has obligations that an election cannot dissolve. It must answer to citizens who challenge the costs of its decisions, including families whose suffering it invokes.
A soldier has a life beyond the victory promised by a politician. A hostage has a life beyond the leverage Hamas seeks from that person’s captivity, beyond the symbolism a government may attach to the ordeal. And the protection of Israeli lives cannot authorize the unlimited destruction of Palestinian lives. Security must be judged by what it actually secures. Otherwise, the word becomes another way of asking people to stop counting the cost.
These are different situations, different powers, different responsibilities. I do not need to flatten them to hear the accusation. You want your daughter to grow up. You want your husband home. You want to open your shop tomorrow, repair the roof, plant something you will live to harvest. Suddenly, these desires seem insufficiently noble. They become cowardice. Egotism. Betrayal. You must defend them before people who claim to be defending your existence. But what is that existence made of, if not these attachments? What exactly are we saving when the lives people want to live become an embarrassment to the cause?
Of course, collective life entails obligations. Danger sometimes requires painful decisions, and people do freely risk their lives to protect others. Their courage deserves recognition. It does not imply everyone else’s consent. Necessity must still be demonstrated; decisions must still be contested. Silence cannot settle the matter where dissent is dangerous. Survival cannot settle it either. Enduring what you cannot escape does not mean you have agreed to it. A cause must answer to those it claims to serve, including those who refuse to die for it.
I return to that television tribute, to the ease with which the word “given” passed over lives no longer able to contradict it, including Wassim’s. Perhaps that is what I want us to interrupt: the confidence with which the living assign intentions to the dead, then demand obedience from the rest of us. Let the people asking for sacrifice explain themselves. Let them listen to an answer they did not write.
And if the blood was taken, let the living have the decency not to call it a gift.
