The limits of our empathy
An Israeli life is worth no less — and no more — than a Palestinian one. Until everyone can agree on that, there will be no real hope of peace.
When I learned that Inbar Haiman had been killed, I had no more tears left to cry.
I sat with her parents just days after she was kidnapped, learning about who she was — a kind and generous woman with a passion for graffiti art, who loved everyone and had infinite space for light and goodness — and the next evening listening to a recording of two boys with whom she fled the Nova music festival.
They recounted, in painstaking detail, the last hours of her life in Israel before she was taken hostage by terrorists, how they ran through the forest for hours.
Inbar spent her national service year teaching in mixed Arab-Jewish schools in the south of Israel. Now, somewhere in Gaza, she is dead.
“Is she eating? Is somebody caring for her if she was wounded? We don’t know. It’s really hard to feel that,” her father told me in October. “The lack of information, that we don’t know.”
I’ve spent a lot of time since Oct. 7 learning the names, faces and stories of the hostages and the thousands who were killed in southern Israel. The scale of it overwhelms me: Even if I spent my life telling one story per day, it would take years to even scratch the surface. The scale of destruction is overwhelming.
But looking through the posters of the hostages overwhelms me for a different reason. On every page, another person whose face I’ve seen a version of countless times — in synagogue, in Israel, at parties and on first dates. Each and every one of them rhymes with someone I know, a person who has impacted my life in ways both profound and simple.
At this point, well-meaning people may ask: How can you care so much about the hostages when 20,000 are dead in Gaza?
I bristle at the question. Why impose this false choice between caring about innocent people on one side of a border or the other? It’s been fewer than six months since the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. 1,200 people were slaughtered in heinous ways, tortured or hunted like animals. There were protests in the streets of the West the next day, gleefully celebrating the murders of Jews as the price of “resistance” and calling for more of it.
But that’s also the easy way out. Although most Jews and Palestinians my age believe themselves to be exclusive victims of the conflict, for whom it follows that “this suffering grants them with a moral right to do anything they deem as necessary for survival,” this sort of thinking, that our pain is the only pain that matters, gets us nowhere.
Our pain does matter. The death of any single person, especially a young person so devoted to peace, is the destruction of a world. And I wonder where we’d be if more people, on both “sides” of this awful war, chose to focus on those worlds, and what led to the destruction of them.
20,000 people are dead in Gaza. Both Hamas and Israel bear responsibility for their deaths. Hamas started this war, broke the ceasefire, and uses its people and their resources to protect the leaders. But when 1 in 100 people are dead, does it really matter who started it?
Of course it does. They must be held accountable, as the hostage families are trying to do to those who kidnapped their relatives. And if you’ve seen their protests, you know that Netanyahu’s government, too, bears responsibility for an IDF that missed or ignored over a year of warning signs.
There’s dignity in being allowed to mourn, of having the resources to take the time and space to do so. There’s a reason we bristle at the site of mass graves, and it’s more than just the scale of violence. It’s at the turning of an individual into just a small part of a statistic.
An Israeli life is worth no less — and no more — than a Palestinian one. And until everyone with a stake in this conflict can agree on that, we’re not going to make any progress.
A recent poll found that Israelis often cited a hostage family member when asked to name someone they’d like to see enter politics. There’s no uniformity of ideology — some call for a ceasefire, others for continuing the war — but all want their families to come home and for the government to recognize their pain.
But I can’t agree more with the sentiment of the poll. Because better than anyone, these Israelis know the tragic stakes of continuing business as usual.
What I’ve written
During my last week at the Forward, I wrote about my thoughts on accountability, repentance and public reckoning in the wake of yet another sexual misconduct scandal, this one involving Hebrew College and Rabbi Art Green.
I spoke about the story — and Jewish journalism — on the Canadian Jewish News podcast Bonjour Chai, too.
And finally, my friend Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern and Jacob Kupietzky have put together a new Haggadah called The Promise of Liberty, which shares how the Passover story has inspired generations of American activists. I have an essay on grief and trauma.
If you like what you read
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The header art for this edition of LEA in Brief was created by the author using generative AI.