I’m writing this off the cuff, after ICE just murdered someone else in Minneapolis in cold blood. Right now, the information is sparse: we don’t know his name, but he was allegedly carrying a gun, which is apparently not just illegal but an act that requires summary execution. I’m sure we’ll do the same thing that we did to Renee Good: pore over this dead man’s last, desperate seconds on earth, arguing about which micro-movements exonerate him or condemn him.

Do you remember in the first year or so of the Gaza genocide, international observers and people on Twitter pushing back against official Israeli narratives? The Israeli government fighting back, saying, “No, we would never bomb a hospital. No, we would never kill civilians. No, no, no, do not believe your own lying eyes?”

Do you remember when they stopped arguing?

At some point in the last two or so years, they stopped responding. Stopped trying to deny. They don’t say, “Yes, we murdered these children,” but they also don’t try to say, “No, these were not children, or if they were, they were human shields” anymore. They just kept bombing.

They just keep shooting.

I keep returning to a book called Neighbors by Jan T. Gross. It’s about how half of a town called Jedwabne in Poland turned on the other half (the Jewish half), locked them in a barn, and burned the barn down. This happened in July 1941, a while after pogroms had become widespread, but still not during the deepest part of the death camps.

Gross’s book was among the first accounts to contest the long-held story that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by German occupation forces. Using transcripts, interviews, and other first-person accounts, Gross discovered that it wasn’t the Germans, but the non-Jewish Polish residents of Jedwabne.

The description on the book’s publisher’s website says the book shows “how people victimized by the Nazis could at the same time victimize their Jewish fellow citizens.”

After the 2016 election, there was a lot of talk about how rural, white, working class men had been left behind. Their jobs were shipped overseas while opioids flooded their communities. Those men were angry, we were told. They needed someone to blame.

The immigrants. The illegals. Build a wall and your jobs will come back. Mass deportations and the drugs will stop. Look there, not here. Blame your Mexican neighbor for working for cheap. Blame the Jews for the presence of the Germans.

We don’t really hear about those angry, rural, white men anymore. I suspect they may be busy shooting poets and men allegedly carrying handguns in the street. I suspect they may have been turned against their neighbor and left to do the dirty work themselves.

The perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre were put on trial after the war. All said that they thought they were just doing what needed to be done to stay safe. They weren’t soldiers, they said, they weren’t decision-makers. They just went the way the winds blew. The national story of Poland became that the Germans were at fault. When Gross’s book was published in 2000, a massive controversy ensued. "Neighbors,” wrote scholar Geneviève Zubrzycki, “created such a rupture in the national narrative of the war that one could speak of Poland “before” and “after” its publication...Neighbors provoked...the questioning of a key story of the nation, shaking its identity to its core."

The perpetrators will continue to deny. The people need to continue to fight for truth.