The Empathy Gap
I try to make sense of the horrific massacre of 1200 innocents and the bewildering response of pro-Palestinian activists
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
When I was a columnist at the Boston Globe, my editor Ellen Clegg once taught me a vital lesson — don’t write when you are emotional. That’s why I’ve waited so long to put pen to paper on the horrific tragedy that unfolded in Israel this weekend (the other reason is that I’m in Copenhagen this week at a conference).
Even now, I am struggling to find the words that capture my revulsion at the stories of more than 1,200 Jews massacred, including babies and toddlers. Reading the seemingly unending stories of Israelis murdered in their homes — with smiling pictures in carefree snapshots, next to images of body bags and corpses draped in sheets and blankets — has sent me into a very dark place.
I keep thinking about the long arc of Jewish history.
For centuries in Eastern Europe, Jewish shtetls were regularly invaded by marauding forces intent on one goal: killing Jews. Later, the Cossacks who perpetrated those atrocities were replaced by the Nazis. Jewish communities that had existed for centuries were rounded up, led to places like Babi Yar in Ukraine, forced to strip naked and shot one by one. The creation of the state of Israel was, partly, a response to these successive horrors. An independent Jewish state would protect Jews from the mass murder to which we had become so tragically accustomed. Yet, in the one place where we were supposed to be safe, a Jewish land protected by a mighty army, we were again hunted down — killed alongside our children and parents, murdered for the “crime” of being Jewish.
For those whom the trauma of Jewish suffering is visceral and real, the parallels are almost too awful to contemplate fully.
Yet, the one thought I’ve been unable to get out of my head since I was awoken to this news on Saturday morning is the issue of empathy — and this statement signed by dozens of groups at Harvard University.
This is not satire. Students at the top university in the United States (and perhaps the world) are placing the “entire responsibility” for the murder of thousands of innocent Israeli civilians squarely on … Israel.
Then there is this absolutely revolting speech at a pro-Hamas rally in New York this weekend in which the speaker in this video jokes about Israelis (“at least several dozen hipsters”) being kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
Or this tweet, so devoid of basic morality it makes me nauseous.
And this statement from Black Lives Matter Chicago.
It’s easy to dismiss this as the rantings of sick and broken people lacking basic humanity and morality. That they cloak themselves in the language of social justice and human rights is all the more odious. But there’s a larger lesson to be drawn — and one that partially explains the persistence of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
They don’t see Israelis as people.
Their suffering and deaths are abstractions.
To recognize their humanity would, I suppose, mean questioning the simplistic narrative they’ve created about the Israel/Palestine conflict in which Israel is a monstrous leviathan intent on snuffing out Palestinian self-determination and dignity.
They have no appreciation for the complexity of the conflict, but, in particular, how terrorist violence has traumatized Israeli society, fed an obsession with security, and convinced Israelis that peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians is not possible (a notion fed by decades of right-wing leaders who fear peaceful co-existence above all else). It’s as if the horror of the Second Intifada, when Israelis lived in constant fear of dying in a suicide bombing attack, never happened. It’s as if the bombing of buses, the attacks on teenagers at nightclubs, and the murder of Jews marking the Passover Seder are passages in history books, not actual events that left a permanent and enduring scar on Israeli society.
Plenty of Israelis remember that Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza — and ended the occupation — only to see Hamas take over that cursed land and spend its time building tunnels and sophisticated rockets with which to kill Israelis. Pro-Palestinian activists complain constantly about Israel keeping Gaza under siege and turning it into an “open-air prison,” oblivious to Israel’s security concerns — concerns that seem all the more legitimate after what happened this weekend.
The simple fact of the matter, which all too many pro-Palestinian activists don’t want to wrestle with, is that eliminationist anti-Semitism has been at the core of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination since its very beginning. When the PLO moved on from it in the late 1980s, Hamas picked up the mantle (and probably did more than any other group to kill the fleeting hopes for peace raised by Oslo).
Make no mistake: irredentist Jewish nationalism and chauvinism are essential reasons why the occupation has continued … but even more so is the refusal of Hamas to reconcile itself to a Jewish state sharing the same sliver of land with Palestinians. There is a reason that Israel has maintained a brutal siege of Gaza for the past 17 years because, as we saw this weekend, Gaza is ruled by a nihilist group of terrorists who maintain a laser-like focus on killing Jews. Does this mean all Palestinians support Hamas and applaud what happened this weekend? Of course not. But many do, and it's the worst kind of liberal paternalism to ignore that reality.
But none of this seems to register with pro-Palestinian activists. Indeed, they don’t truly see the Palestinians as people, either. Instead, they are treated as perennial victims who have little agency and share no responsibility for the continuation of the conflict. They, too, are merely valorous stand-ins for a grotesque morality play.
This is one of the reasons I find writing about Israel/Palestine so frustrating and why I’ve largely stopped doing it: the inability of either side in its conflict to empathize with the other.
To be clear, this is not just a problem among critics of Israel. Supporters of the Jewish state, including many Israelis, are oblivious — and often contemptuous — of the humiliation and fury caused by decades of occupation and dispossession. They don’t see Palestinians as individuals but rather an inchoate mass of “Arabs” who are intent on killing Jews. For far too many of them, there is no difference between Hamas terrorists and ordinary Palestinians. They, too, are one and the same. That viewpoint allows them to see the Israeli military’s killing of innocent Gazans (even if unintentionally) not as an equally awful tragedy but as something akin to just desserts. It’s understandable, I suppose, that fury over this weekend’s barbarism would foster such attitudes, but nothing about this is new. Israelis have spent years viewing Gazans who died in Israeli military strikes as collateral damage.
Yes, Israel has a right to respond to terrorist attacks … but killing more Palestinians only feeds the cycle of violence. So too does the refusal to acknowledge that the status quo in the West Bank, which Hamas does not control, feeds Palestinian humiliation and, in turn, fury. But, as long as Israelis are unaffected, far too many are largely unbothered.
This empathy gap is an enormous and underappreciated part of why this conflict continues. When both sides see the other as less than human and unworthy of compassion, there is little reason to make concessions on their behalf. They can convince themselves of the rightness of their cause and the depravity of their enemies — and their suffering does not register. They are inconvenient facts to be shunted aside. It almost feels trite to say it, but as long as Israelis and Palestinians — and their supporters — see each other as something other than flesh and blood humans with the same desire for freedom and the same love of family, their benighted land will never know a moment of peace.
Please watch this video to understand the horrors unfolding in Gaza right now.
Musical Interlude
Great piece. Agree with every word. But please write it as ‘antisemitism’. There is no hyphen as there is no opposite concept of Semitism.
Ok, some (many?) supporters of the Palestinians are idiots, and there can be no justification for massacring civilians. Thank you for ALSO admitting Palestinians to the circle of those deserving empathy. It’s a shitty situation that is not helped when those of us away from the violence conveniently forget the death and terror inflicted on Iraqi civilians because of fake “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction. In my opinion state-inflicted death and terror is no different from that caused by fundamentalist zealots.
But I don’t understand how we can get away from the fact that Israel is a settler state like all former colonial territories (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all the Latin American republics). Unlike indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand the Palestinians were dispossessed in the 20th century. They have (cynical) allies who will give them modern arms and encourage them to “drive Israel into the sea.” At a time when indigenous peoples in many places have succeeded in winning concessions from settler governments because the merits of their complaints are recognized more and more, how can Israel stick it out? Don’t support them blindly as a guilt offering for western antisemitism. Israeli encroachments on the little territory allowed to the Palestinians is not the way to claim the moral high ground no matter the latest atrocities. Those atrocities were made inevitable by Israeli right wing policies.