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Raphael Wahl

Diaspora’s Dilemma: Loving from Afar

Reflecting the perspective and emotions of the Jewish diaspora in relation to Israel (AI)

Living between despair and hope: The weight of fear, the ache for peace, and the struggle to reconcile. Is there a way forward?

Now that the immediacy and urgency of deescalating the devastating war in Gaza, with its harrowing hostage crises, has been addressed through a painful but necessary ceasefire-hostage deal, I find myself haunted not by relief but by reflection. The deal, while momentarily stemming the bleeding, feels like a bandage placed over a wound that refuses to heal. The broader conflict, with its endless recurrence of violence and mistrust, looms large, like a chronic disease releasing its symptoms in deadly, repetitive bursts. It is a disease rooted in history, in trauma, and in deeply entrenched fears, a disease that seems as immune to cure as it is to containment.

This lingering sickness fuels a tension that clings to every conversation I have with my Israeli relatives and friends. It’s a tension rooted not just in the current political or security situation but in something much deeper, something that feels immovable and eternal, a cycle of fear, anger, mistrust, and violence that turns like a wheel we are all strapped to, dizzy from the spinning and unsure if we will ever disembark.

“Why should I convince them they’re safe when they’re not?” This question gnaws at me, even as I know the answer is impossible. Safety feels like a foreign word when existential threats are omnipresent. How can I possibly, from the comfort of my diaspora home, surrounded by the luxury of space and time, assure Israelis that they are safe when the evidence suggests otherwise? Why should I want to?

And how can I, with my lofty ideals of peace and reconciliation, address primal and rightful fears, fears that are not hypothetical but lived daily?

How can I speak of trust and bridges to Palestinians who see their oppressors as unrepentant, their tormentors as unyielding? The sheer audacity of suggesting trust in such a context feels almost cruel.

The Hamas assault of October 7, 2023, made this already unbearable reality so much worse, perhaps even irreversible. It was an eruption of human barbarity on a scale that defies comprehension, a shattering of any lingering illusions of security or decency. The images of massacred families, of children abducted from their homes, of entire communities wiped out in a single night, tore through the collective psyche like a blade. It was not just an attack; it was a declaration that the depths of cruelty know no bounds, and the fragility of life in Israel was exposed in the starkest terms. I think of my own children, asleep in their beds, and cannot fathom how I could ever feel safe again if they were at risk of such horrors. The trauma of that day reverberates endlessly, seeping into every conversation, every silence, every fleeting thought of hope. It’s a scar that may never heal, a reminder that the wheel of violence has not just spun, it has spiralled into depths darker than anyone dared imagine.

Perhaps I am feeling particularly fatalistic today, but it strikes me that we, in the diaspora, face a paradox. From afar, we are granted a helicopter view, a broader perspective unclouded by the immediate survival instincts that dictate life in Israel or Palestine. We can see the forest while others are lost among the trees. But this distance also makes us ignorant in other ways. We lack the visceral urgency of now. We lack the immediate understanding of what it means to live with sirens, rockets, checkpoints, occupation and the weight of existential anguish pressing against every decision.

How can we possibly ask of Israelis to end the occupation when the peace movement and the left have learned their lessons in the nineties? When Israel was full of suicide attacks? How can we ask them to remove checkpoints and the security barrier when it stopped almost all attacks? I imagine myself walking my children to school, knowing that barriers and checkpoints are all that stand between them and an unthinkable tragedy. Is it not even inhumane to ask this? And yet, we have to think of the future, of an end to the status quo. How do I reconcile this deep moral conflict within myself, the need to acknowledge the unbearable necessity of these measures while yearning for a future that transcends them?

When I suggest reconciliation, I hear the counterarguments from both sides, sharp, disarming and unrelenting. Israelis, with their no-nonsense pragmatism, remind me that survival trumps idealism. For them, the resolute urgency of now beats any enlightened path towards extending a hand across the divide. “It’s easy for you to speak of peace,” they say, “you don’t live with the fear that your children might not come home from school.”

And Palestinians, too, have every right to push back. They ask, “How can we trust those who have humiliated us, tormented us, stolen from us?” Reconciliation feels not only improbable but insulting in its naïveté.

This is the vicious circle we’re caught in, a chain of endless bloodshed and violence that feeds on mistrust and perpetuates itself. The diaspora voice, however well-meaning, often feels like a whisper in a storm, drowned out by the immediacy of survival.

And yet, I write. I write because despair cannot be the final word, though it feels overwhelming. I write because I must believe that this chain can be broken, even if the path to doing so is obscured by the fog of history, trauma, and righteous anger.

What can we, as members of the diaspora, truly offer? Perhaps it is humility. A recognition that while we see more, we also understand less. That our helicopter view is no substitute for the lived experience of those on the ground. We can advocate, amplify voices, and push for policies that prioritize human dignity and life over ideological entrenchment. But we must do so without the arrogance of assuming we know better.

Still, there is a selfish element to our perspective in the diaspora, one that is hard to admit but equally valid. We are privileged, yes, but that privilege does not exempt us from despair. We care deeply about Israel’s wellbeing, and yet we’re also left feeling it is unfair that despite our investment of love and concern, we are powerless to influence the daily realities. It feels particularly bothersome when figures like Bibi Netanyahu presume to speak on behalf of all Jews worldwide, conflating his political agenda with our collective identity. Our distance, which affords us perspective, also burdens us with a unique hopelessness, an anguish that stems from loving a place so deeply and yet feeling like an outsider to its fate. This duality, privileged yet helpless, adds another layer of complexity to the despair we carry.

The bridge we must cross is vast, and it feels, on most days, insurmountable. But perhaps the act of naming the despair, of grappling with it openly and honestly, is itself a small step forward. If we cannot yet extend a hand across the divide, perhaps we can at least bear witness to the pain on both sides. Perhaps we can hold space for the hope that one day, the wheel will stop turning and we will all finally step off, dizzy but intact, ready to walk forward together.

For now, all I can do is write. And hope.

About the Author
Raphael Wahl is a 42-year-old system engineer. An incorrigible bookworm, he is also a devoted pizza margherita apologist, a computer and music geek and an enthusiastic researcher of the quirky and profound. Deeply committed to peace and the power of dialogue, Raphael actively participates in an inter-communal dialogue group of Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims and others from around the world. Rejecting the zero-sum mentality, he passionately believes in fostering mutual understanding and empathy in the complex landscape of Israel and Palestine.
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