What Two Years Of Writing About Israel/Palestine Taught Me About Empathy
The answer to this conflict is hiding where you don't want to look.
In his novel, The Secret of Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton tells the story of a priest who also happens to be a world-class detective.
A visiting playboy named Grandison Chase asks him how a man of the cloth got so good at solving grisly, diabolical murders. And Father Brown offers him a powerful and slightly alarming lesson in empathy:
You see, I had murdered them all myself, so, of course, I knew how it was done.
I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course, I knew who he was.
After a moment of shock, Chase relaxes. “You frightened me all right, for the minute I really did think you meant you were the murderer […] of course, if it’s just a figure of speech and means you tried to reconstruct the psychology…”
But Father Brown isn’t having it.
No, no, no, I don’t mean just a figure of speech […] I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders. I didn’t actually kill the men by material means, but that’s not the point […] I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realised that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action […]
No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls…
It’s comforting to believe that human beings aren’t capable of the full spectrum of human behaviour. That some people, like us, are only capable of doing good, while others, like “them,” take pride, even pleasure, in doing evil.
That “they” are broken in some fundamental, unchangeable way. So much so that it would be impossible to put ourselves in their shoes, never mind their heads.
After all, they’re monsters, not human beings like you and me.
Sadly, I’m not as empathetic as Father Brown.
So two years ago, shortly after Hamas launched the brutal October 7th attacks, this was my best attempt at understanding how anyone in the West might come to defend or even celebrate their actions:
It’s worth noting that all of these people think they’re on the right side of history […] but because they believe the world is made exclusively of perfect victims and evil villains, because there’s no room for nuance in a worldview that sees everything in black and white, they think that being a good person means mindlessly defending one side, no matter what they do […]
But if we no longer understand that terrorism is wrong no matter who commits it, if we can’t agree that the murder of innocent civilians is never cause for celebration, if we aren’t awake to the fact that the slaughter of children is never justified, well, we might as well stay asleep.
But over the next two years, I learned that millions of people, some of whom had applauded this view when it was aimed at the defenders of Hamas’ terrorism, were happy to defend terrorism as long as it was committed by the settlers that Israel has spent decades funding and supporting.
They stood proudly with people who mocked the murder and rape of civilians, as long as those people were Israeli politicians and press and members of society at large.
They could even mindlessly defend the murder of “as many kids as it takes,” as long as those kids were Palestinian, of course.
And it was only after spending two years trying to reason with these people, two years of appeals to common humanity and principles and carefully gathered evidence, that I decided that they didn’t care about truth or justice or moral consistency, they were broken in some fundamental way that made it impossible to understand them.
They were monsters, not human beings like you and m…oh, wait…crap.
If I’ve learned anything in my two years of writing about this conflict, it’s that we’re wrong to believe that empathy comes naturally. That it’s comfortable and instinctive and, most improbable of all, easy.
Because while this might be true when we’re empathising with people who are already part of our tribe, empathy is only really valuable when applied to people whose feelings we can’t easily understand. True empathy, as Father Brown notes, means thinking and thinking about how people could do or say things you find detestable.
It means discovering that they are within you, too.
And yet, even knowing this, even as I write these words, it’s still painful to believe that I could ever be like “they” are. It’s almost unbearable to imagine what style or state of mind I would have to be in to justify killing children, to cheer after shooting Palestinian civilians or to call my parents gleeful that I “killed Jews with my own hands.”
Every fibre of my being wants to reject the possibility that I’m capable of this part of the spectrum of human behaviour.
But empathy means recognising that if you were scared enough, you might justify any amount of cruelty to ensure your survival and that of your children.
It means admitting that if you were a nineteen-year-old kid, born in Gaza, and the wall that held you prisoner your entire life came down, you might make a choice that the current version of yourself can’t fully understand.
It means recognising that if you were fed the right combination of propaganda and dehumanisation and fear, if you lacked the critical thinking skills and integrity to verify the facts for yourself, you might be one of the people advocating the murder of babies and making TikToks mocking innocent people being starved and bombed to death.
Because, as unpleasant and even painful as this recognition is, as hard as it is to find each other’s humanity in the midst of all this death, isn’t it harder than watching this killing continue?
Even in a world as saturated in tribalism as ours, I can’t think of anything as tribal as this conflict.
Do you call it a war or a genocide? Is “from the river to the sea” a call for liberation or eradication? Do you want a ceasefire or are you a filthy “Hamas-lover” who deserves to be raped?
We’ve codified our tribes with these, and a thousand other battle lines. Not long ago, I was blocked by someone in my “tribe,” for daring to suggest that not all of Israel’s defenders were “vicious, evil, and demented.”
And to be honest, I get it.
I’ve spent long enough dealing with the gaslighting and the lies and the cynical accusations of antisemitism hurled at anybody who sees Palestinian and Israeli lives as equally valuable, that I don’t want to spend another second speaking to or thinking about or dealing with people who can’t. I don’t want to understand them. I don’t want to listen to their point of view. Some days, I don’t even want to breathe the same air as them.
But all of us who call for peace are asking the people in Israel and Palestine to do something infinitely more difficult; to breathe the same air as people who have killed and oppressed them and their families for decades.
After so much death and suffering and destruction, I have to believe that the overwhelming majority of people want peace. Not a negative peace, which, as Martin Luther King said, is just the absence of tension, but a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.
And justice requires, at the most basic level, that we take a long hard look at each other and ourselves.
Because none of us is any good until we can face the truth of how bad our side has been, and how bad we might be given the right provocation and the wrong circumstances.
None of us is any good until we’ve realised how little right we have to this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about millions of people as “colonisers” and “terrorists” as if they were apes in a forest ten-thousand miles away.
None of us is any good until we understand that there are no monsters, just human beings like you and me.
Well said as always, and now I'm curious about that novel.
While reading this, I was reminded of one of my closest friends, who I'm not sure even has the necessary genes for empathy, and has that kind of black-and-white absolutist view of something a little less violent: people who voted for Trump. She thinks they all, like her, believe he's literally Hitler and he wants to destroy the world, but they actually want Hitler to destroy the world.
To her, these are defective people. Not wrong, or mistaken, or uninformed, or just possessing a different opinion, and I cannot convince her that one can be a decent person and still vote differently than her. It doesn't make them right, just different. Different life experiences, different values, different priorities. Nope, that just proves how irredeemably defective they really are, for not relying solely on her sources of information and coming to her conclusions. It's all or nothing.
And this is why fear is weaponized by those who do or would control us. Fear of the Other keeps me from seeing how much we are alike.