Israel/Palestine Feel It? Or Fight Over It?

Once again … still … always … these are difficult times, friends.

To be honest, I haven’t been digging into world news much. I get the lowlights from NPR and Seth Meyers, and haven’t sought out a whole lot more. I’ve downloaded podcasts about what’s going on in Israel & Palestine and the specific cognitive dissonance of liberal American Jews, but I haven’t listened to most of them. When I have a few minutes free, chomping down PB&J before moving onto other responsibilities, I’ve generally sought out educational pieces on the history of Israel & Palestine, not reporting from the front lines. This practice hasn’t felt right, but it also doesn’t make my heart hurt. And I’ve got other stuff on my plate.

My beloved online sangha had our monthly checkin on Halloween and I was late due to candy responsibilities and missed what was going on with the Jewish women in the group. I assumed we were all on the same page politically – this is a spiritual community that came out of a Socially Engaged Buddhist program, so we tend to agree on issues – but it became kinda clear I wasn’t really with them in spirit. On my turn, I talked about my disgust with what’s happening and what’s happened, some difficult conversations I’ve had with an anti-Muslim guy at The Listening Place, sympathizing with anti-Israel protestors while questioning the tone and content of those protests, and basically just spitting out whatever random shit was floating around in my mind. Someone else spoke, we sat in silence for a bit, and then one of my Jewish Sisters said,

We’ve been kicked out of everywhere. Where is there left for us to go?

And I finally felt it. I felt there was something deeply lacking in my engagement. I felt that I was behaving in a way that was human-adjacent, instead of truly sinking into the human horror of the situation. And it wasn’t just that I haven’t seen many images of what did happen and what is happening (though that is true), and it’s not that I don’t have sympathy (I do), and it’s not that the fog cleared and I saw the clear path to the right way to witness this conflict, but I knew what I was doing was wrong.

It wasn’t until a dear friend and I connected today that I figured out what was wrong, or rather we figured it out together. She and I are both Jewish, but almost entirely by heritage. Neither of us grew up in a Jewish culture or in families that practiced Judaism, culturally or religiously. We did both grow up in highly political families – left-wing, activist, anti-war families. That was essentially our religion. So in the same way that Jews, no matter how liberal, may have a bias when it comes to Israeli sovereignty, we have a political bias that colors our perception of what’s happening. And that obfuscates the humanity of the situation just enough to where I am not witnessing in the way that a Socially Engaged Buddhist should.

What does that mean?

Well, it’s subtle, and it might be almost imperceptible from the outside, but putting the political ahead of the human suffering changes the way I think and talk about what is happening. It turns on my brain and dampens the embers of my heart. And that is not how I want to approach suffering. I want my eyes open, my heart aflame, and my brain subservient to the two (three) of them.

Example: the conversation with the anti-Muslim guy referenced above. He has a sweet disposition and a lot of knowledge, but in his homeland, Bangladesh, his mother was slaughtered (his word) by Muslims, and he has a deep and understandable bias against the religion and those who practice it. During the usual invitation for prayer requests, he asked that we think of the hostages and all the Israeli people who had suffered because of Hamas. I countered with, “and all the innocent Palestinians who are being bombed and killed by Israel.” I knew about his Islamophobia, and didn’t want it to go unchecked. Since he is really a kind and engaged person, we had a pretty long talk about it afterwards. He knows more history of the area than I (questionable though it may be) and knows more of the Koran than I (again, from a particular perspective), and while I knew everything he was saying was not true, I was unqualified to meet him where he was at. Eventually I said that I really didn’t think we could continue the conversation because we couldn’t agree on basic facts, and that he wasn’t going to convince me (as it appeared his intention was) that Islam was a fundamentally and distinctly violent religion. This was all done in a calm and friendly manner and we had a pleasant interaction on a different topic a short time later. It isn’t my tone that I’m trying to fix here; it’s the foundation of the discussion. It was futile to even engage in a conversation based on history and religious beliefs, and not just because of my own ignorance. It’s because all of that background is intellectual, and our brains will defend that apparent rationality to the death. The only way to chisel a crack into that hardened foundation is through the heart. It’s the heart that led him down that ideological path – his broken heart for his murdered mother – and it’s only the heart that has a chance of changing him again. Instead of arguing about the righteousness of one side of the other, we could have addressed the suffering of the families. We could have talked about the children. We could have simply acknowledged the pain of the human beings caught in this hell. We could have softened our hearts instead of entrenching our positions. We could have empathized instead of trying to win.

Would it have done any good? I don’t know. But I am more interested in the long game than the winning this particular pot. If there is anything I can do to help this man let go of some of the suffering that he interprets as hate and disguises as justification, it won’t come from arguing the merits of the Palestinian position. It will only come from love. I’ve spent a lot of time studying how to talk to people about race in the last decade, but I still fuck up fraught conversations constantly. Of course, I feel far more comfortable arguing over the history of Black people in America than I do the Middle East, but my comfort or familiarity is not the point. It always comes down to coaxing our humanity to the surface. Not just the humanity of the people we’re demonizing, but the humanity of the person who’s demonizing them. I should have asked him more questions, confirmed that I was understanding him correctly, and kept coming back to the people and the suffering. No, we wouldn’t have resolved out positions or, certainly, the war itself, but a seed might have been planted for a bit more growth in the future, a little less preaching and a little more witnessing, a little thimble of space for holding these victims with care and respect before jumping back into justifications and self-righteousness.

I don’t know. But I do feel, feel, that the way I’ve been approaching this isn’t right. Buddhism is pretty deontologist – since we can’t know how things will turn out, our attention is focused on performing as wisely and lovingly as we can in the moment. There are no ends that will justify an immoral means. So killing civilians in order to stop a terrorist is hard to justify. And cultivating compassion is always a good choice, even if it does nothing to end the war of the moment.

Ideally, compassion would bring us to a place of peace. But I’m not naïve enough to expect that in Gaza. I can only try to practice on a small scale what I want from the world at large, and my heart won’t let me do otherwise for long. Witnessing the pain on both sides hurts, but protecting myself with an intellectual glaze just feels gross, and I hope I’m past that for now.