Where has our humanity gone?

Children are dying. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lost their homes and their livelihoods. They must fight for tents, food, and water. They have no electricity, no sewage treatment and no garbage collection.  They have no medical treatment, no medicines, no anesthesia, and no maternity wards. Palestinian children in Gaza have no schools or frameworks for childcare. Palestinians are exposed to the elements, to war, and to disease.

They are completely invisible to us Israelis.  We do not hear about them on our nightly television news programs when we get our daily dose of war coverage. We do not see their pictures, nor hear their voices, so we do not recognize their humanity.

Children are dying. Innocent Israelis are held hostage for months in a living nightmare. Families of these innocents are living their own nightmare since October 7^th. Many of the survivors of October 7^th are living the trauma while the families of those whose lives were snuffed out struggle to cope. Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes and livelihoods in the Gaza envelope and in the north of Israel.

But Israelis are not humans in the eyes of many Palestinians. All they see are oppressors who deserve what they got on October 7^th. The barbaric attack was a cause for celebration for many Palestinians, if only to inflict a small measure of pain in return for the years of suffering inflicted upon Palestinians by their Israeli tormentors. Most Palestinians see themselves as the victims and therefore can never see Israelis as anything other than victimizers. I have no expectation that Palestinians will feel empathy for our suffering. When it does happen, I am deeply moved.

Even when we accidently turn on CNN, flip through the New York Times or get forwarded a post from some humanitarian NGO about the suffering of the Palestinian people, instead of feeling empathy for their misery like we would for Ukrainians or for Sudanese, we avoid those feelings by immediately blaming someone for the suffering; Hamas, the PA, the Palestinians themselves etc.

I am not claiming that any Israeli should feel an ounce of pity for the terrorists who committed the atrocities in the Gaza Envelope on October 7^th.  I am not suggesting that the terrorists who are holding over 100 Israelis hostage in Gaza deserve anything other than death. I don’t want to take away anything from the heroic efforts our forces are making to return our hostages and our sense of security. I simply want to say that we must recognize the enormous human suffering caused by this war. We must stop looking away from the pictures of Palestinian children, women, elderly fleeing their homes in Gaza, begging for food, water and shelter, giving birth in the streets and dying of disease spread from untreated wastewater and mountains of uncollected garbage.

My humanity does not depend on the humanity of others.  My humanity depends on my ability to see humanity in others, even in those who hate me. This war must end now before more children are killed, before more amputations are performed without anesthesia, before more hostages die in captivity, before more missiles are fired, before more die on the battlefield, before more disease is spread, before more opportunities are missed and before our ability to see humanity in others is lost forever.