‘Being objective’ about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza doesn’t help solve the root causes
People walk past posters of hostages displayed before entering the departures hall in the Ben Gurion Airport on Dec. 25, 2023. Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
American and Israeli Jews have never felt further apart.
While many American Jews are growing increasingly uneasy with a war that has wrought unthinkable destruction in Gaza, a recent Channel 13 poll found that a plurality of Israelis would oppose a deal to free the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza that ended the war against Hamas.
As an American Jew with deep ties in Israel, this is a difficult reality to reckon with. Since Oct. 7, I’ve both felt viscerally that the Jewish people are under attack, and that I need to compartmentalize these feelings to talk about the conflict fairly and effectively. Especially when engaging left-leaning audiences, I aim to give as much weight to Palestinian suffering, narratives, and concerns as I can, even when doing so feels as though it detracts from the unthinkable tragedy that just befell my own community.
But spending a week immersed in Israel’s post-Oct. 7 environment changed my perspective. For Israeli Jews, Oct. 7 is not a series of policy developments, but an immensely personal trauma experienced firsthand: hiding in safe rooms with young kids with terrorists right outside, evacuating threatened communities that once provided a sense of safety, sending loved ones off to the front.
Experiencing Israel in this state, and listening to Israeli colleagues recount their experiences, taught me that walling off my emotional ties to this place is neither possible nor desirable, and showed me that embracing my subjective perspective is actually key to understanding the conflict.
Making space for our pain
While in Israel, I was acutely aware of what I was not seeing: the more than 14,000 unaffiliated Palestinians reportedly killed, the nearly 2 million displaced, the neighborhoods leveled. Most Israelis wave it all aside as an unavoidable consequence of Hamas’ behavior. There’s little moral discussion about the war’s humanitarian cost and the need to minimize it. Israelis lack the emotional bandwidth to prioritize anything other than their own security. I now have a sense of how that feels.
Many American Jews, particularly younger ones, seem uncomfortable making space for our own pain while the Palestinians are suffering on such a greater scale. But pretending that we don’t have a stake in the conflict helps no one; in fact, we have a responsibility to empathize with our Israeli community, at a time when few in the world seem willing to.
After experiencing the wartime environment in Israel, I can say that understanding our own community’s experience is the only way to grasp how both Israelis and Palestinians perceive the ongoing war and the conflict more generally.
Absorbing wartime Israel
Under pulsating trance music and dim neon lights at an exhibit recreating and commemorating the Nova rave massacre, my Israel Policy Forum delegation saw the WhatsApp screenshots, abandoned clothing, destroyed cars and eerily familiar faces of young Jews in their early 20s, victims of unthinkable atrocities. We walked gingerly through shattered tiles and sooty rubble in Be’eri, where survivors retraced terrorists’ steps under periodic booms of Israeli artillery firing at Shaja’iya, mere kilometers away, where the IDF was in the midst of an intense battle with Hamas.
Two days earlier in Shaja’iya, one of the most tragic incidents for Israelis since Oct. 7 took place. The IDF mistakenly shot and killed three escaped hostages. As Israelis reeled from this unimaginable loss, I attended a protest in Tel Aviv in support of saving the over 100 hostages still in Hamas captivity.
I came to that rally as an observer. But as I weaved through the crowd to get a better view of the stage, where relatives of Oct. 7 victims gave impassioned eulogies and railed against the government’s neglect, I felt myself dissolve into the collective. With Israeli flags and protest signs flying in front of my face, as chants of busha (“shame”) echoed around me, we began to march up Rothschild Boulevard toward Hostages Square, Tel Aviv’s makeshift memorial commemorating the hostages.
The collective emotions washed over me: the pain of my community losing so many innocents, the anxiety of our humanity being violated, the outrage at the prime minister for refusing to take responsibility, the fear that none of us would ever truly be safe. It felt like nothing else mattered.
This feeling of an all-consuming national crisis permeated our trip’s meetings. As we sat around conference room tables with normally stoic Israeli journalists and policy experts, I could hear the anguish in their voices as they unpacked Israel’s challenges in Gaza, the political and military fiasco that has shattered Israel’s social fabric, and impending escalations in the West Bank and the north.
Speaking to Israeli colleagues and hearing the cries of ordinary Israelis at the protest, I began to understand why the Hamas attack is not a discrete tick on the timeline for them. It is a nightmare they relive daily as the media continually uncovers stories of Oct. 7’s heroes and victims, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis remain indefinitely displaced, as over 100 hostages waste away in captivity.
Constantly grappling with this anxiety and trauma, most Israelis don’t consider the humanity of ordinary Palestinians whose lives are destroyed. They do see how Palestinian society has been consumed by an ideology that denies Jews’ humanity. They hear voices abroad claiming those slaughtered were illegal settlers on Palestinian land, denying Hamas used rape as a weapon of war, and clamoring for a cease-fire even if it leaves Israelis in danger.
These sentiments did not surprise me. I’d read them in Israeli media, heard them from Israeli friends, and had them relayed to me by Israeli colleagues. I’d analyzed them and considered their implications. But for the first time, I was internalizing them.
Grappling with what I didn’t see
As talking to Israelis about the impact of Oct. 7 forced me to confront the magnitude of the crisis, I found myself clinging to the justness of fighting Hamas, the purity of Israel’s victimhood and Israelis’ collective determination to survive. When you feel your existence threatened, all you have is b’yachad nenatzeach (“together we will win,” the war’s official slogan).
Due to the security situation, we could not travel to the West Bank to meet with Palestinians, as I have done in the past. On this trip, I did not confront the “other” or absorb personal wartime anecdotes in which Israelis were not the victim. It was unsettlingly refreshing to take a break from considering the other side.
The green pastoral farmland of southern Israel rolled by my window on the drive back to Tel Aviv from Be’eri, and with the smoky scent of death still lingering in my nose, I struggled to wrap my head around the apocalyptic scene I had just witnessed: a community of secular, liberal Jews — people just like me — who were raped and kidnapped and slaughtered in the year 2023. Seeking to distract myself, I opened my phone and began tapping through Instagram stories, only to face post after post decrying the IDF’s actions in Gaza.
I felt hot resentment fill my chest. How could I be expected to care about the collateral damage of Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas after what we went through? How is it that so many deny these atrocities?
Sitting with this discomfort on that silent van ride, I observed how difficult it was for me to accept Palestinian pain and humanity in my current state of mind. In that moment, I was internalizing a dynamic fundamental to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Throughout the rest of the trip, as I continuously observed how easy it is while in Israel to dismiss Palestinians’ victimhood, I considered how the same dynamic exists in the other direction.
This war comes at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are already struggling to accept each other’s legitimacy. A joint Israeli-Palestinian public opinion poll conducted in December 2022 showed that 84% of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians see themselves as the exclusive victim in the conflict, and that 63% and 90% of those groups respectively believe that this victimhood “grants them with a moral right to do anything they deem as necessary for survival.” A Gallup survey taken after Oct. 7 now shows that 65% of Israelis oppose Palestinian statehood, as opposed to 61% who supported it in 2021. 72% of Palestinians believe that Hamas made the correct decision to carry out the Oct. 7 attacks.
But who could talk to Gazans about Israelis’ trauma when Israel has blown their neighborhoods to rubble and wiped out entire families? Palestinians aren’t ready to recognize that their side carried out senseless atrocities, and it’s not because they are all Nazis. They are also a people under existential threat.
After decades of an eroding horizon for statehood and Israeli leaders now openly calling to push them out of Gaza, the only way forward many see is defeating Israel. Just as Israelis clamor about “no innocents in Gaza,” Palestinians are doubling down on armed “resistance” against Jews. When all you feel is your own pain, it’s difficult to be measured in responding to threats.
In the short term, we cannot change Israelis’ blindness to the other side. As Jews in the diaspora, we should embrace solidarity with Israelis and allow ourselves to feel their pain and fear, especially at a time when so few in the world are willing to do so.
But we also must step back to consider how narratives and trauma shape the conflict. It is on us, those who have a personal stake and the physical distance to put it into context, to emotionally understand and intellectually reject rhetoric that ignores, demonizes, or dehumanizes the other. We don’t need to be objective, but we do need to remain clear-eyed about all obstacles preventing a just future for the region, including those on our own side.
The trauma from war will easily last generations. Neither people is going to abandon its victimhood narrative any time soon. Each side’s future rests on its eventual willingness to use its own narrative as a starting point for understanding the other’s.
To contact the author, email [email protected].
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