Socratic Dialogue (Part 1)
Post-Prandial Blood Libel
The dining room hummed with the soft chime of cutlery against porcelain. Candlelight licked the rims of Bordeaux glasses; the valley beyond Selena’s picture window lay in dark folds, scattered with distant porch lights.
At the polished mahogany table sat four: Selena, sharp-tongued and restless; Nigel, her partner, heavy with provincial opinion; Ben, watchful and diplomatic; and Adrian, the scholar—equanimity wrapped in courtesy, a provocation all its own.
Wine had loosened tongues. As it always did here, small talk drifted toward dangerous waters.
The Window and the Pause
Selena rose half from her chair and stared out into the valley as if consulting an oracle. She let a long silence bloom, then another, her lips moving slightly as though rehearsing an incantation.
Selena (softly, then gathering force): “You know, Adrian… I was thinking about the other night when our neighbor had that loud party, music thumping past midnight. You felt it, didn’t you? The way noise gets into your bones? Now…” (she pauses again, eyes still on the valley) “…now imagine that… but near hostile ears. Israel held a party on Gaza’s border. Of course, there’d be retaliation. I mean, let’s be honest, they knew what they were doing. They did it deliberately to antagonize Gazans. So…” (another long, satisfied pause) “…they got what they asked for.”
She sat, serene with her verdict.
Nigel (snorting): “Exactly. Governments, Hamas, Israel, America, all the same. Crooks and cover-ups. You know how it works, Adrian. Nothing is ever what it seems.”
He leaned back, chuckling at his own cynicism.
Adrian Names It
Adrian (placing his glass down, voice even): “Selena, what you’ve just uttered is not a theory. It is a modern blood libel dressed as insight.”
Selena (rolling her eyes): “Oh, here we go, the professor with the big words.”
Adrian: “For centuries, Jews were accused of provoking their own destruction, of poisoning wells during plague, of ritual murder to bake Passover bread. These were fantasies stitched from fear. Your analogy is the same garment, newly hemmed. You equated your annoyance at a neighbor’s playlist with the ‘provocation’ of a genocidal massacre. You turned Jewish joy into incitement; Jewish presence into trespass; Jewish death into a deserved response.”
Selena (cool again, chin lifted): “Don’t be dramatic. I’m just describing cause and effect. Noise near hostile ears. Actions have consequences.”
Adrian (gentle but exact): “Facts have consequences. The Nova Music Festival was a civilian event, lawfully held on Israel’s sovereign soil, miles from Gaza’s urban centers. Hamas’s invasion was not triggered by music. It executed a military plan rehearsed for years: intelligence breaches, drones to blind observation towers, paragliders, torture squads, mapped routes, and underground infiltration networks. There was no cause-and-effect. There was only premeditated mass murder.”
The Ad Hominem
Selena (leaning forward, voice sharp): “Oh, listen to you. Mr. Knows-Everything. Always a document. Always a charter. Always a ‘fact.’ Normal people don’t need dusty texts to see the truth: Israel kills children; we all see it. You swan in, sanctimonious, like the Oracle of Delphi.”
Nigel (laughing): “Adrian the Oracle! Ha! We’ve got eyes, mate—we see the news.”
Ben (calm, cutting through): “I certainly don’t think that, Selena. Adrian is one of the most humble people I know. His intellectual humility is second to none. He quotes sources because truth requires evidence, not because he needs a pedestal.”
Selena’s smile thinned. Nigel fumbled with his fork.
Adrian’s Patient Counterpoint
Adrian: “This isn’t about me. It’s about the architecture of what you’ve said. To blame victims for proximity is to reassign guilt from the perpetrators. It mirrors the oldest genocidal logic: they provoked us; they brought it on themselves; they knew what would happen. That is the chorus behind pogroms, lynchings, and state purges.”
He turns slightly, still courteous.
“International law is explicit. Under the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute, the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime, regardless of grievance or politics. Proximity to a border is not provocation. Dancing is not an act of war. Your analogy does not explain the atrocity; it excuses it.”
Nigel’s Interruption
Nigel (waving a hand): “My cousin in Palestine says the Jews stole the land. People pushed out have a right to hit back. You can’t deny that, Adrian.”
Adrian (steady): “I deny false history, not grief. The land was never a sovereign Arab state named ‘Palestine.’ It was Ottoman, then a League of Nations Mandate for a Jewish national home. In 1947, the UN proposed partition; Arab leaders rejected it and chose war. They lost, and the refugee tragedy followed, alongside the expulsion of over 850,000 Jews from Arab lands. Two traumas; one world remarkably selective about which it remembers.”
Selena (with a brittle laugh): “Look at him: our walking archive. There’s always an answer, isn’t there?”
Ben (sharper now): “And thank God there is. Because your answers are memes and mood; his are history and law.”
The Lineage of the Lie
Adrian (unruffled): “Selena, your window parable, music as provocation, isn’t innocent. It’s manipulative. It converts your private irritation into an alibi for atrocity. It’s the same structure that once claimed Jewish wells made Christians sick; now it claims Jewish joy makes jihad ‘understandable.’ That isn’t analysis. It’s a blood libel rebranded.”
Selena (snapping): “Stop twisting my words! You are arrogant. Everyone says you think you know everything.”
Ben (quiet, decisive): “No, you said that. And you said it to silence him.”
Law, Doctrine, Intent
Adrian: “Hamas’s doctrine removes the last fig leaf. The 1988 charter calls for the obliteration of Israel and the murder of Jews as a religious act. The 2017 document, cosmetically softened for the West, reasserts the land as an Islamic waqf, non-negotiable, forever. October 7 wasn’t a spontaneous tantrum at a rave. It was doctrine made operational.”
He lets that sink in.
“Your claim that Israel ‘asked for it’ because there was music near ‘hostile ears’ is an ethical collapse: conjecture as evidence, imagination displacing fact, the murdered made culpable by their own joy.”
The Boundary
Selena (low, defensive): “So I can’t even feel what I feel without you policing it?”
Adrian (kind, unyielding): “Feelings are welcome. But when feelings become fictions that absolve atrocity, they exit the realm of empathy and enter the business of complicity.”
A long pause. The valley lights winked in the glass.
Adrian (finishing): “Let me be unmistakable: the festival was not a provocation; the massacre was not a response. Your attempt to stitch causality between the two is a moral trespass. I won’t let it pass as ‘opinion.’ If you wish to keep speaking with me, respect is required, not for me, but for truth itself. For the dignity of facts over fictions, evidence over outrage, reason over the cruelties of sarcasm. The line is clear: joy is not provocation; dancing is not war; Jewish life is not an incitement. To imply otherwise is not empathy; it is complicity.”
He folded his napkin. Ben’s hand touched his sleeve, brief, approving. Nigel mumbled into his glass. Selena stared again into the valley, where music, if there had been any, could not be heard.
The conversation ebbed to safer shores, but the fissure remained: whimsy against witness; propaganda against proof; the shrillness of ignorance against the quiet of intellect.