Why can’t we mourn all the dead? | Essay

A few weeks ago we convened a group of Muslims and Jews in our network to talk about the unrelenting pain we experienced before and after October 7, 2023, when everything in Israel-Palestine was already so broken , broke exponentially.

It was days after the discovery of six Israeli hostages who were shot shortly before their captors fled. “I feel like I’m mourning Hersh [Goldberg-Polin]. I feel like I know him,” said Ryan, who is Muslim. His sadness was palpable. Deeply authentic. His words hung heavy in the air.

Then, after a breath, he continued with equal emphasis: “And I wonder how many Palestinian Hershs were also killed, along with all the life and potential that lay before them.”

With that breath and what came before and after, Ryan embodied the full human compassion that has been counterintuitive to so many over the past 12 months:

Palestinian life is sad. Point.

The life of Israelis is sad. Point.

Full “Yes.” Full “And.”

In the words of Hersh’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, “The time has come to be human.” She has admonished negotiators and national leaders on CNN, but this applies to all of us. No matter how frightened, angry and desperate we may feel now, we must remember that our destinies and interests are intertwined. If we cannot find each other’s humanity, we risk our future together.

We have worked together for several decades at NewGround, a Los Angeles-based organization that empowers Muslims and Jews to bridge divides that threaten both the well-being of our communities and our fragile democracy. Over the past year, we and our staff have brought together diverse groups of Angelenos on the most difficult questions of this time – from “Does the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ mean the annihilation of Israel – or the Jews?” to “Is Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians?” “ – in a space in which it is possible to preserve the humanity of others. Our network includes Jews, Muslims and sometimes people from other faith communities, some with deep connections to Israel and Palestine, others without any personal connections. We know that the conflict in Israel-Palestine is political And that there are always religious undertones and we know that not all Palestinians are Muslims and not all Israeli citizens are Jews. Yet no one on the NewGround network has been left untouched by the effects of the violence and polarization there.

And the most difficult thing was to help even our own people resist the dehumanization of one group or another. Our brains are wired to homogenize people we perceive as outside our “tribe”—a tendency that increases dramatically during severe conflict.

We see how difficult it is for some Jews, Israelis and others to imagine Palestinians as parents who love their children. And how demoralizing it is for Muslims and Palestinians to have to prove their humanity at this most basic level. Muslims ask questions like: “How can killing 200 Palestinians to save four Israelis be justified?”

We see how difficult it is for some Muslims, particularly Palestinians, and others who are deeply concerned about them, to view individual Israelis as anything other than evil aggressors. Jews and Israelis ask themselves: “How can one not watch as mothers are taken away from their children, children are taken away from their parents, and people who worked for peace are killed in homes and in the fields?”

Interests from many quarters have worked overtime to convince us that only one group or another has humanity and value. This is particularly difficult terrain for individuals who have direct personal experiences and trauma on one side or the other.

In the conversations we convene at NewGround, we strive to create conditions that help people authentically share their pain and perspectives – and give them the resilience to witness the pain of others, which in turn becomes milder and can open up perspectives to a wider range of topics. We ask tough questions when we know there are big differences, and then ask people to stand on a spectrum of agreement and disagreement before talking about why they chose that position. Or we do a fishbowl exercise and invite Muslim and Jewish participants to form two concentric circles, both facing inward. The outer circle listens – without talking – while the members of the inner circle – be they Muslims or Jews – answer a hot question individually and in the discussion. When the first conversation is over, the circles swap places. The whole group then chats. Working with a diverse group of Jews and Muslims, sometimes with other faith communities present, ensures that participants can better understand everything at stake, rather than remaining stuck in binary thinking.

It takes courage and strength to look at someone else’s pain when you are in deep pain yourself.

It takes discipline to process our own pain, to hold our tears instead of suppressing them, and to care about the pain of others. It takes humility, especially in the midst of deep vulnerability, to say, “I don’t always understand, but I know I must understand.” We remain committed to upholding the values ​​of both traditions: each life is a whole world , and kindness and justice must go hand in hand. It is more than a challenge and yet essential.

To truly rehumanize each other’s people, one must acknowledge specific lives lived and lost and not just speak of a general “suffering” of a group. Knowing people’s names and who they might have become in the world. Description of the hell in which people continue to live. We understand that none of our communities are monoliths.

This is how we remember the death and life of the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, whose last interview with CNN was broadcast at his request only after he was killed on December 7, 2023. In the interview, he described feelings of desperation as a powerless parent to protect his children. Unimaginable calculations like: “How to hug your child so as not to scare him with a goodbye hug?” “Should we sleep in the same room so that when we die, we die together, or split into two rooms, just in case “That part of the family could survive?”

And we remember the death and life of Israeli peacemaker Vivian Silver, killed on October 7th. Hiding in the safe room of her home on Kibbutz Be’eri, Vivian argued with a radio – angry at being forced to articulate a one-sided position to an interviewer. “If I survive, we will have a deep and complex conversation about two sides,” she told him. Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, is now involved in peacebuilding full-time and recently shared how moved he was to learn that a soup kitchen had been set up in Gaza in his mother’s name because of the relationships she had built with the people there was.

We are working hard and against the grain to expand the capacity of our people – and those outside our network – to hold together all this humanity and all this loss. It takes courage and strength to look at someone else’s pain when you are in deep pain yourself. Particularly when it feels threatening to do so because you know their pain will be exploited by others to delegitimize your own.

We learned from the late neuroscientist Emile Bruneau that dehumanization arises in the gap between excessive empathy for one group and lack of empathy for the other group. His insights into empathy and conflict resolution have helped us understand a lot about our work in perspective building and conflict transformation. Unfortunately, as we look at the rhetoric and actions in our broader communities at this moment, we see that much of what was described in his studies impacts our larger communities, both in Israel-Palestine and here home. We see things like triumph and joy at pagers exploding in grocery stores, or calls for all Jews to “go back to Poland.”

We know that the only antidote to this kind of dehumanization is to ask people to rehumanize each other. This does not stop the violence immediately. But it is part of the calculation for a lasting solution to the conflict. And a powerful form of rehumanization is for our entire people to mourn together, as Palestinians and Israelis do every year in a joint memorial ceremony.

In a session earlier this year, one of our Jewish members, Eli, reminded us of philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of “mournability.” Butler asks us to pay attention to whose pain, whose humanity is deplorable and whose is not. Grief can change depending on the context, but tends to decrease where the forces of power are concentrated. Generally speaking, in mainstream American politics and media, the lives of Israelis are deplorable and those of Palestinians far less so. On “the street” (including many social media and alternative spaces), the lives of Palestinians are deplorable and the lives of Israelis are far less so (and there is a kind of power here too, of a different nature). In the 2017 study “The Enemy as Animal,” Bruneau and psychologist Nour Kteily found that even in asymmetrical conflicts, symmetrical dehumanization contributes to the prolongation of violence.

These critical insights, along with those of civil rights scholar John A. Powell, who urges us to be “tough on structures and soft on people,” remind us to acknowledge and address power imbalances And to remember that pain is pain and also needs to be acknowledged and addressed so that we can move forward together.

So our question is very simple, yet extremely difficult: Search forlisten to each other’s stories and mourn them. Even – and especially – when things are hardest. Resist the ways your anger and desperation might turn you away from someone else’s humanity. Even righteous anger has an insatiable appetite; It can strip you of your own humanity and affect the way you interact with others, including your loved ones. Remember each other, and please remember yourself: A key to permanently ending violence is to look beyond the exclusive “us or them” view that the world prefers and shift our gaze to a larger realm of dignity, Security and safety to expand justice for all.