What I Learned at the Erez Gate
Since I visited the West Bank, I’ve felt compassion for the Palestinians and the hardships they endure. Walking the streets of Hebron, participating at prayer at the Jamal Abdel Nasser Mosque in Ramallah, I met men whose warmth was unmistakable. But when the talk turned to Israel or the Jews, faces changed — anguish hardened into anger. The shift was startling and unforgettable.
Later, I visited the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, created by the English artist Banksy. It made me feel sick to my stomach. It seemed like terrorism porn for wealthy Western activists — boutique despair for people who fly in, wallow in other people’s misery, and fly home feeling purified by proximity.
That, I think, captures the larger sickness afflicting the Western imagination: empathy that has lost its ethical anchor.
At the Erez Gate, I watched hundreds of Palestinians streaming into Israel to work. Before the war, some 18,000 Gazans held Israeli work permits — vital lifelines for families. Egypt, by contrast, has kept its border mostly closed to Gazan workers. That small human detail said more than a thousand protest slogans.
Later, I spoke on the phone with a young “peace-activist” couple living inside Gaza. They spoke in code — for fear of Hamas. That fear spoke louder than any manifesto. It told me peace will come only when Palestinians are free from the tyranny of their own rulers.
The moral difference between the two sides should be obvious. One uses civilians as shields; the other, however imperfectly, warns civilians before strikes and trades convicted prisoners for kidnapped children. Yet among many young Westerners, that asymmetry has been blurred — or even reversed. People who once marched for universal human rights now chant slogans written by a theocratic militia.
They aren’t evil; they’re confused. They’ve inherited a worldview in which “oppressed” equals good and “powerful” equals bad. Israel becomes the stand-in for the West’s original sin, and Palestinians its absolution. It feels compassionate, but it’s compassion unmoored from truth.
Empathy without ethics is moral pornography. It indulges emotion while evacuating thought.
Still, we can’t pretend that Hamas rules a population uniformly opposed to it. I’ve seen the crowds cheering militants as they paraded the abducted and beaten from the Nova music festival. Some of those celebrating were teachers, doctors, even UNRWA employees — people who should have known better. Released hostages have described being “kept safe” by families who abused them. That’s not everyone, but it’s not no one either.
Polls have at times shown broad support for Hamas in Gaza — numbers approaching eighty percent in moments of war fever. Maybe that’s fear, maybe indoctrination. But it’s also proof that Hamas’s ideology runs deeper than outsiders want to believe. The danger now is that the latest “peace plan” becomes another kick-the-can-down-the-road ceasefire that leaves the same men with the guns and the money in charge.
Donald Trump — of all people — has managed to force peace on Benjamin Netanyahu, a man whose politics rely on perpetual tension. Now Hamas will pretend to disarm, march from the tunnels waving flags, and claim victory. That would be a tragedy — for the world, and above all for the Palestinians — because it would mean another twenty years of fascism masquerading as liberation. Gaza without true stabilization will become Somalia by the sea: armed factions, no governance, no future.
Golda Meir once said, “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” I used to think she was right. Now I’m not so sure. Hate is a powerful currency — more profitable than peace, especially for those who’ve enriched themselves through war. The men who made fortunes from Gaza’s misery are still in charge, and still counting.
When empathy replaces ethics, cruelty wears the mask of virtue. The world doesn’t need more performative outrage. It needs discernment — the courage to tell life from death, victimhood from responsibility, and hope from hate.
