By Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries
It is hard to write about Israel and Gaza. Hard because words stumble where pain reigns. Hard because truth, once spoken, too often finds itself drafted into war. Words are weapons. But still, I write. Because silence, too, is a weapon. Sometimes it is the most deadly.
The Nova Exhibition sits now in Boston, a space of memory and mourning for those lost in the attack on the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023. Built from what was left behind. Charred cars. Torn tents. The fragments of a music festival where rhythm was meant to rise, not end in gunfire. To walk through it is to see how fragile peace is, how easily the beautiful can be broken. I have seen this exhibit twice. Felt the pain and remembered with friends.
But even as these rooms recall the terror, another story unfolds: hostages potentially returning home. Some old, some young, all scarred by the unbearable arithmetic of captivity. Their faces will tell us that freedom, like peace, is never free.
I imagine Martin standing here today, the Dr. King who wrote from Birmingham, who looked into the soul of America and saw the sickness of our easy justifications. He would not look away from the suffering of Israelis, nor from the devastation and families lost in Gaza. He would see children buried in rubble and mothers mourning and waiting by phones that do not ring. He would call both the massacre and the siege what they are: a failure of love, a collapse of our shared humanity.
King once said that “cowardice asks the question, Is it safe? Expediency asks the question, Is it politic? And Vanity comes along and asks the question, Is it popular? But Conscience asks the question, Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.” And from that jail cell in Birmingham, he said to beware those who seek “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”
If Martin were alive today, I think he would walk through the Nova Exhibition with tears in his eyes and questions in his throat. I believe he would not choose sides of geography, but sides of conscience. He would call us to build a world where grief is not ranked, where the dead are not divided, and where every mother’s cry carries the same weight.
He would ask those of us standing in cities like Boston, far from the dust and fire, What will you do with your witness? Will you turn it into empathy, into dialogue, into the slow labor of repair? Or will you trade empathy for argument, righteousness for rage?
The Nova Exhibition is an installation we can visit, but it’s also a mirror. And in its reflection, we see not only the victims of October 7th, but the limits of our compassion.
Because in this moment, as we hope hostages return home, as we hope bombs stop falling, and everyone’s homeland is restored. Because we know the world does not only need more allies. It needs more witnesses. It requires more moral courage.
And that is what Martin would do.
Imari K. Paris Jeffries, Ph.D., is the President and CEO of Embrace Boston, where he is leading a citywide racial equity transformation through The Embrace monument, the Embrace Center, and ongoing community organizing efforts. Imari was recently named one of Boston’s most Influential Bostonians by Boston Magazine and the Boston Business Journals Power 50. He is a four-time graduate of UMass Boston and received his Ph.D. through UMass Boston’s Higher Education Program in June 2023.