Rachamim

In Hebrew, womb is רחם, rechem, and mercy is רחמים, rachamim, and both words grow from the same root, ר-ח-מ, as if the language knew from the beginning what reason is still trying to prove, that compassion is not born in the mind, but in the body, in the same place where life begins before it has a name. It is a truth about human nature embedded in the grammar of my people, the idea that loving and protecting and showing mercy are gestures of the same muscle, the oldest one there is.
Israel was born with this word in its mouth, in prayers, in the poems of Leah Goldberg, in Golda’s speeches before she learned she no longer needed it. I grew up believing that a country carrying compassion in its religious grammar was a country that could not, structurally, forget what it means to be vulnerable.
I was wrong, of course. It is always this way with words a people carry for too long. They lose their weight, become ornament, turn into the kind of thing one recites in synagogues while signing orders that contradict every syllable.
Being an Israeli leftist today is not a political position. It is a clinical condition. It is waking up every morning in a country I recognize on maps and cannot recognize in the mirror, a country that speaks of survival so often it has confused surviving with winning, and winning with punishing, and punishing with existing. The Israeli right has learned a trick that every right learns sooner or later, calling weakness anything that resembles conscience. Mourning the dead on the other side became treason. Asking about the cost became naivety. Hesitating became complicity with the enemy.
What was lost was not peace, because peace was never more than a project, a wish, a text under permanent revision. What was lost was the capacity to hold contradiction, to be at once capable of defending one’s own existence and of recognizing that the existence of others is not negotiable. Political thought that cannot tolerate ambiguity always ends in violence, because violence is the only way to resolve what intelligence cannot bear to leave open.
I am of the left because I believe that a state that treats civilians as collateral damage loses something that no military victory can recover, and because I believe that the memory of the Holocaust, if it serves any purpose beyond liturgy, is to create in us a permanent allergy to dehumanization, not a license to practice it in the name of security. But saying this out loud here, in this country, in 2026, is to be met with the expression reserved for those who confuse conscience with weakness.
The problem I have come to suspect is not that Israel has lost its empathy, but rather that we outsourced it, shifting the moral burden to future generations who one day with any luck will know where it went.
I stay. Not out of heroism and not out of masochism, but because even though I no longer understand very well who we are, I know that we are, and I know that the act of letting go is irreversible. So I stay, and I write, and I disagree out loud, which is the only form of love I have left for this place.