Polar, Parallel, Converging

Immediately following October 7, 2023, the shock coupled with depression and nuances of emotions emerging from those circumstances for each individual took their toll on me too. Sometimes an emotional roller coaster with the highs simply showing you how high the low could go. Sometimes the mechanics of routines.

The roller coaster wasn’t sustainable, so I went to the children’s part of the park and sat in a train that traveled on a track that twisted and turned on level ground just above ground, and some time just above water, but sustainable. You’re there with your grandchildren, so during blackouts you reassure them not to fear the darkness – the lights will shine again.

This past week, I was knocked off track. To a polar climax that feels so low. The low that shuts my mouth. The hearsay I can’t repeat. Compassion for the other. The should-be disbelief about the perpetrator – the Jewish Israeli perpetrator. The tears. Impatience. Lack of focus. The sensation familiar, another wave unfolds upon the shore and then recedes into the sea. A pattern.

A week ago, with the release of hostages who looked as bad as was expected from the beginning of this current hostage-prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, Israeli society was compressed back into that breathless space where each breath is reserved for measured purposes. In the previous weeks each hostage released looked – outwardly – better than expected. Expectations had improved making reality hit harder. It didn’t require discussion to read the public mood meter – everywhere you felt reduced capacity to laugh, smile, enjoy. A reminder of the earlier days of the war, a reminder of the resilience of the society enabled mostly to live on routine tracks with birthday parties and weddings and on a parallel track of anxiety, fear, uncertainty, sadness – and identifying with families who await the return of their loved ones held hostage in Gaza, and families mourning the loss of their loved ones lost on October 7 or in the ensuing war.

Depending on the width of the track, its breadth and your breath and how it fills the space, depending how you see the horizon facing the parallel track, there is that empathy for innocent children and adult victims of the war in Gaza, for Palestinians in the West Bank suffering without recourse at the hands of Jewish settler violence.

Mid-week, I went to Jerusalem to meet friends for lunch. Since I was in Jerusalem, and time permitted, I joined a demonstration that morning behind the Prime Minister’s Office, demanding the return of the hostages and the end of the war.

Meeting two close friends, a third woman joined us for lunch – a childhood friend of the others, to me a familiar friend of friends. I could stereotype by how she dresses and where she works and be close to target – she is religious and right wing. Her sons-in-law were on extended military reserve duty throughout this war. I presume she separates herself from any empathy for Palestinians, but maybe I’m too harsh. I presume she doesn’t have Palestinian friends, colleagues, or acquaintances.

In discussion over lunch, she asked where I work, and I explain that it’s a binational organization with Israelis and Palestinians from the West Bank. I share some of my frustrations, insights, empathy for Palestinians, and disappointment with the absence of a symmetric kind of empathy even if I rationally comprehend it. I mention differences among people of different levels of education, from urban or rural areas, north and south, from the West Bank, different from Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel. Superficial on my part, gauged.

She had to leave a few minutes before the rest of us. Then, one of my friends says, “You almost gave her a heart attack with all your talk about Arabs.” Thinking I had spoken within the range of moderate and reasonable, even if based on interactions that are not mainstream, I commented that the other woman listened politely and didn’t express any adamant objections to my remarks. To her credit, I suppose. Perhaps not to mine. The intricacies of the fabric of Israeli society and the threads and strings holding its frayed edges together.

These two friends and I have another close friend in common. I recently met with that other friend. In conversation with her, she mentioned hesitating to meet with our other two friends before the war during the months of weekly protests against the government attempt to sabotage our democracy with its judicial reform. I looked at her in disbelief, knowing one of the two never missed a Saturday night demonstration against the proposed reform and the other is totally aligned. But our society is so polarized. We are programmed with stereotypes pasted to pictures in our minds of family and the closest of friends, and in our reluctance to face confrontation, we often don’t dare to talk, or to listen, and then we miss discovering discover shared bonds replacing faded images.

But the ultimate impetus for my low this week came later, and not from meeting with friends, but from reading the minutes of a meeting I missed. A Palestinian colleague shared what he heard from his cousin, released from an Israeli prison after 14 years. He insists his cousin had no blood on his hands, arrested for joining in rock throwing at Israelis when incidentally present on a scene. That piece of information, presumably was to preempt an Israeli response – a response, knowing our team, that would have remained unspoken – lest we would have stressed the danger his cousin could have posed for us. After all, sticks and stones may break my bones – or worse. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, I read my colleague’s account of brutality of Israeli prison guards reportedly experienced by his cousin upon his release in exchange for Israeli hostages. Brutality and a certain evil cruelty by Israeli guards towards the Palestinian prisoners that I will not reiterate here. I want to hold to disbelief. Yet I want reports by our hostages to be believed. And I remember too many incidents perpetrated by Jews against Palestinians that I would like to disbelieve despite their truth. Can I disbelieve this incident? It seems I can just have a minor functional breakdown: agitation, tears, tired, loss of focus – depression undiagnosed.

My memory kicks in with stories I heard in November 2023 about Israeli methods of interrogating Nukhba prisoners. It was painfully disturbing. It was expected among Israelis to agree then that nothing is proportionate to what the Nukhba did to Israelis on October 7. Interrogate as you must. Compliance with international law? Rhetorical. If you were the Israeli soldier interrogating, do you detach or compartmentalize, resume life traumatized as usual, and advocate for human rights? Living on parallel tracks until they converge.

Harriet Gimpel, February 15, 2025