In the first months of the war in Gaza, the Israeli response to the October 7 attack, I believed in the justness of its goals: returning the hostages and eliminating Hamas rule in the enclave. It aligned with the things I believed in, and I even wrote op-eds about it for international media outlets, where I advocated for disarming Hamas, demilitarizing Gaza and reinstating the Palestinian Authority there with international security guarantees.
At first, I felt nothing in the face of the Palestinian suffering in Gaza. Unlike many Israelis, I was exposed to images from Gaza in the local media in Britain, where I live, and on social media. But I didn't want to look directly at it. I was still emotionally detached.
Even when I realized (fairly early on) that the suffering there is disproportionate, even compared to the atrocities of October 7, I still felt no emotion toward it. I was captive to the narrative of Israeli suffering, at whose end is the dehumanization of Palestinians in general and Gazans in particular. In the narrative of Israeli suffering, "only Hamas kills babies," which is a direct continuation of "there are no innocents in Gaza."
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Sometimes I wondered how it was that I didn't feel the terrible suffering of the Palestinians. But each time I asked myself that question, I would read in the Hebrew-language press about some new survey that found that over 80 percent of Palestinians support Hamas or that 70 percent think the October 7 massacre was a legitimate act of resistance, and I immediately told myself that this was why I'm indifferent, even though I was already against continuing the war. The dehumanization process was complete.
Palestinians react as they inspect the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on a house, in Gaza City, on Monday.Credit: Mahmoud Issa / Reuters
Last summer, the British documentarian Robin Barnwell contacted me and asked me to serve as a consultant on his film "A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians," which tells the personal stories of Israeli victims of the October 7 attack and of Gazan victims of war. (It has recently been nominated for an International Emmy Award in the Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary category.) At first, I only saw the segments with the Israeli victims. There were moments when I really broke down and asked the director and editor to pause for a bit. This only sharpened my emotional detachment, my inability to comprehend the horror that Israel is inflicting on the Strip.
The days immediately after October 7 were the finest hour of the "newly sober" Israelis – the people who seemingly identified with the left or the center and crossed over to the other side. A few of those political penitents made their "disillusionment" into an axe to grind, becoming popular guests on the pro-government Channel 14 but also on the mainstream news channels, most of which push the government's talking points.
I too am sobering up now, but in the opposite direction. I've been living outside of Israel for 16 years, and more than once I have run into anti-Israel views that bordered on antisemitism. Living as a Jew in Gentile-majority countries has affected my worldview and made me more forgiving of the pressure cooker of "Israeliness" that I resisted when I lived there. October 7 turned my world upside down. I was shocked not only by the Palestinian terrorists' brutality but also by the almost automatic anti-Israel reaction of many of my friends in England, Jews and non-Jews alike. I severed ties with some of them almost immediately.
The turning point came when I saw the film in its entirety. I remember when I sat in the editing room and watched the Palestinian side for the first time. I saw young Rada, whose mentally disabled brother went out to fetch a sack of flour from a distribution point – a dangerous daily experience in itself – and was shot by an Israeli sniper. And the young cameraman Ibrahim, whose little nephews were killed before his eyes, and the physician, Dr. Mohammed el-Ran, who lost about 16 members of his family.
It was the first time I saw terrifying, graphic scenes of children whose bodies had been torn apart by Israeli bombings. And that was my sobering up moment. I was released from the narrative of Israeli suffering and the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Suddenly I saw human beings again, and I couldn't believe that the brutality they were experiencing was being done in my name and by members of my own people.
This brings to mind a quote by Marek Edelman, who was the de facto leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: "To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never the oppressors."