ISRAEL | PALESTINE

TW: Israel Palestine War

I had a dream last night in which I was standing in Israel as plumes of smoke rose into the air. I stood on timeless stone walls erected within mere meters of the border that separated Gaza Strip from the rest of us. Crowds cried and panicked and bustled as a barrage of rockets flew in all directions.

We watched as they rained down on the Palestinian settlement. Indignant Israelis with family members among the hostages cheered as buildings burst into flames. I watched as a missile descended from the sky and rendered two of the settlement’s biggest structures into lifeless husks. The wounded, bloodied and desensitized faces of the Israelis surrounding me cheered vengefully as a boom resounded. I found myself among the cheering.

But another missile followed suit. It ripped through the skies of Gaza Strip with a violent crescendo as it plummeted to earth. It sent screams into the air and the two skeletal skyscrapers collapsing to earth. Cheers faded to a silence as we stood in petrified awe of an inferno that seemed almost blinding. We watched a visceral panic spread through the Palestinian settlement. We watched as fire spread from home to home through the densely packed community. The few cheers that had lingered turned to a quiet devastation as we all watched women and children leaping from windows, colossal pieces of rubble crushing entire families.

As I stood there absorbing the chaos, I had a biting epiphany about the hideous cost of war. I didn’t appear to be alone. I awoke with tears in my eyes.

Looking back at my time in Israel these past few days has brought with it a whirlwind of emotions. While I was there, its fraught and violent past was plainly visible throughout so much of the country. But it was kept at bay. We could examine it through the lens of a people far removed from the pandemonium that prior generations faced. We could learn history with the security that it wasn’t at our doorstep. It was a time of peace.

The streets of the country were alive with culture, and so many of the strangers I met there were all too willing to launch into lively conversation with a lost foreigner. There was a pervasive feeling of friendliness in the air that could be felt even through the communities where the Israelis and Palestinians lived cooperatively. The country was peaceful in a way I’d never even known in my home city of Philadelphia.

The strides taken there were enough to convince me that nearly all of my preconceptions about the country were untrue. The commonly held image of Israel as an embattled hotbed of terrorism, violence, and controversy simply didn’t mesh with my experience of the New Jersey-sized nation.

Israel had its wounds; many of them were kept on cautionary displays. They represented lessons learned and trying times endured. They were worn sometimes like badges of honor. The Israelis were a people pained by their scars yet proud of their resilience through all of the inflicting lacerations.

Travel brings to life the places in the world that seem like far-away plights and fantasies. Distant plains become real. There’s a removal when it’s only through TV screens that we see the lives affected by war. For so much of the world, the war in Ukraine feels like little more than a concept — a far-away place whose strife we see but cannot feel.

But this war in Israel has felt very different for me. Though I can’t call myself an Israeli citizen, I can say that my time there made some awful realities out of what once felt like intangible legends. The walls of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, were steeped palpably in the tragedies that the Jewish people have lived through. It brought to life a chapter of humanity that I might have preferred to leave at a distance. It’s a place that causes deep hurt for the Jewish people to revisit, but it’s with an unyielding dignity that its doors remain open.

Even as someone with Jewish identity, I’d spent much of my life under the belief that I wasn’t even entitled to a belief on the Israel-Palestine conflict. After having spent some time in Israel, I can hardly say that I feel differently. The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the most tirelessly contested subjects of the last millennium. The conflict stretches so far into antiquity that no historian could recount all that there is to know. It goes back to a place where legend verges on fact and we enter into the murky waters of the bygone.

Both sides to the conflict have entire textbooks worth of evidence to cite about their stakes of claim to the land in dispute. Both have lists of atrocities committed against them that reach all the way back into the time of pharaohs.

In the wars that hinge on religious disputes, true reconciliation is all but impossible. Both Jews and Muslims believe they’ve been granted right to the very same land by the very same God. The millennia worth of conflict that has emerged from that lone fact has wrought a sea of turmoil too vast to part.

Many critics argue that the recent escalation can be traced back to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership failures. His strategies leading up to this escalation had been the target of international criticism for months. It’s his prioritization of personal power over the nation’s best interests that many feel is directly responsible for this attack. But while leadership decisions and political motivations can shape the course of conflicts, it’s the resulting human tragedies that leave the most lasting impact.

There’s not always an ambiguity to the horrors of war. There are no gray areas to be seen when starved masses of quarantined races are being huddled into gas chambers. The atrocities of WWII are something that the world can uniformly look back on as one of the great barbarities of human history.

When civilians are pulled from cars and homes to be slaughtered, it harkens back to chapters that some of Israel’s citizens had hoped to forget. When holocaust survivors are taken hostage, there are no rationales to be made. When innocent civilians are raped and tortured, it transcends territorial disputes. When babies are systematically murdered and decapitated, it’s part of an evil so senseless that it can make it difficult for the world to sympathize with the Palestinian cause.

What Hamas has done here is terrorism, and their grand mission is to erase the state of Israel. In only days they’ve carried out crimes against humanity that it will take entire generations to recover from.

But even as death tolls on the side of the Israelis continue to mount, it’s crucial not to forget about the nearly 2.2 million innocent Palestinians who’ve found themselves quarantined without fuel, water or electricity. As Israeli missiles rain down and internet connections falter, the settlement that housed the Hamas terrorist organization is quickly losing its connection with the outside world. Entire towns and cities have been reduced almost completely to rubble, and the people being pulled from it aren’t just Hamas militants.

Palestinian hospitals will need to subsist without reliable access to electricity. What fuel their powerplants have is expected to run dry soon.

The sad truth is that whatever reckoning the Palestinian citizens are about to face as a result of this siege is overwhelmingly no fault of their own. Hamas is not Palestinian people and the Palestinian people are not Hamas. The cost of warfare isn’t only the lives of leaders, extremists and combatants, but children, doctors and seniors. It’s no majority of Palestinians that want this brutality. But now it’s every Gaza Strip resident who must bear the brunt of the horrible lunacy that took shelter within its walls.

With nearly all means of support to the embattled city cut off, we’re quickly approaching one of the great humanitarian crises of the decade. Those that will die as a result are the same women, children, and war survivors that exist on the other side of the wall as well. It’s a humanitarian crisis that affects both sides of Gaza’s border. As Israeli tanks continue lining the outside perimeter and preparing for siege, this will likely worsen before it can improve.

Whenever there’s a mass loss of life, it’s important to remain objective. On this floating rock, these wars we fight are over imaginary lines. But the lives we lose are as real as the people we love.

We’re all born into separate contexts and conflicts. We don’t experience the same misfortunes. It’s only in the worst moments that we actually get to understand the horrors of these strange, foreign places. But sometimes it’s in the only home you’ve ever known that the rolling camera suddenly turns toward you — and it’s you living through the unspeakable. That’s why empathy is critical. Because time doesn’t falter and history can arrive at any moment. Wars can erupt and bombs can fall and homes can be leveled in lethal blasts.

Genocides take place, and Holocausts can happen, and entire cultures can be erased. But when we learn the right lessons from our darkest chapters, we can prevent heinous new ones from ever being written.

How this war will all unfold is uncertain, but what’s undeniable is that the sheer loss of human life has already proven catastrophic, and that sensitivity is crucial.