Israelis and Palestinians are steeped in a history of trauma. It reproduces and continues | Michael Segalov

Three weeks into this latest eruption of violence, one emotion prevails. It’s what I felt as news broke of more than a thousand Israelis being murdered on 7 October. The same as Gaza is pounded night after night, Palestinians slaughtered in their thousands; or when I hear of civilians routinely killed by Israeli weapons in the West Bank, long before the world once again took notice. I worry for the safety of loved ones in the region. Yes, harrowing images shock. But really, I’m struck, again, by a total lack of surprise at all that’s happening: these events all feel so predictable. That’s not said with nihilism, nor as a detached pragmatist, but as someone who empathises deeply with all those caught up in this perpetual conflict, in ways I’ve long struggled to articulate or admit. I’ve marched waving both flags, and understand the psyche of both “sides” in ways I for a long time wished I didn’t: that would be far easier. Recently, I’ve come to see that this empathy may be a privilege.

Raised in a liberal, London Jewish community, I long viewed the state of Israel as a place to which I had a deep commitment and connection; its staunch defender. In adulthood, exposed to other outlooks, my views profoundly changed. I felt cheated, only taught a selected history. This affords me a generosity to parties that some others might never allow themselves to feel.

Any civilian death feels profoundly painful. My empathy extends to those sent into battle. I understand why Palestinians fight for their freedom: Gazans languish in the world’s largest open-air prison; Palestinians in the West Bank face violence from the Israeli state and far-right settlers, and are refused basic rights. I also understand why third-generation Israelis see national service as a duty, a question of their survival.

Amid the civilian tragedies, I felt an unexpected wave of sadness when I heard the news that a 20-year-old British, London-born IDF soldier – Nathanel Young – had been killed in action. In the arena of war, he’s distinguished from civilian targets. He made an active choice to serve, not conscripted like his fellow fighters. Yet while I profoundly disagree, I can understand why he was willing. My upbringing also taught me that risking one’s life, as he did, was a noble cause. It’s a choice I might well have made, as some friends did, had things turned out differently.

In 2019, I returned to Israel – my first visit in almost a decade – on a reporting assignment. Being in the only country where being Jewish does not make me a minority still soothed wounds inflicted upon generations of ancestors that I’ve inherited. That same trip, I ventured for the first time into the West Bank. In Hebron, I saw with my own eyes the mistreatment and oppression of its Palestinian population. Walking streets Palestinian residents are forcibly denied access to, I for the first time truly understood its label as an “apartheid state”. I witnessed how the Jewish homeland has come at the expense of others who’d also lived there. As we’ve seen in protests across the world these last weeks, an ever-growing portion of the Jewish diaspora feels similarly.

While these lands might well feel a Jewish ancestral home, within living memory, it was shared with another people: the majority. Certainly, Jews lost their lives too in Israel in the early 20th century as they settled in greater numbers. But by 1948, more than 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees,15,000 killed. If the rhetoric of some in Israel today bears out, Gaza may soon see fatalities in these numbers.

While working representing convicts on death row in the United States a few years back, I learned of the concept of mitigation. Once a guilty verdict for some major crimes is returned, the defence may set out why its client should be spared the harshest punishment. Not in an effort to absolve or excuse, but to contextualise actions. The most common experiences to come to light are histories of trauma, abuse and cruelty. There’s no justifying the worst of what Jewish settlers just a few generations before mine did, nor any atrocities committed since, but the fear and trauma – of the Shoah, of the Nakba, of generations now born into perpetual fear – surely provides some explanation. It’s through this lens I now see this cycle of violence.

Those of us not ourselves lost in the fog of war urgently need to understand this more nuanced story. That despite the fact that Britain’s promising of a land to the Jews not theirs to give away stinks of imperialism, early Jewish settlers were far from their imperial soldiers, but a persecuted population failed by global governments pre and post Holocaust. That while Israel’s early paramilitaries didn’t march to the beat of Europe’s imperial drum, to the Palestinians who by 1948 were expelled from their land, what difference? Both fights are steeped in trauma. Now on both sides, it’s reproduced and continues.

However painful it is to admit, we must accept that this iteration of a Jewish state is built on irreparably broken foundations. Now 75 years in, Israel continues to veer further rightwards. Short of a total transformation of domestic Israeli politics and a major geopolitical shift – or World War Three – this violence only ends two ways. One: the eventual permanent exclusion of the Palestinian people from equal citizenship on the land, their resistance continuing until they’re erased from Israel’s expanded borders, displaced or destroyed entirely. The only alternative is reconciliation that sees Jews and Arabs truly share the land. At the turn of the 20th century, these two communities coexisted in Palestine, before the project to advantage one group over another started to become a reality. A future where Palestinians and Israelis live side-by-side in relative peace is no easy road, but this only starts with the acknowledgement of an unbearable history: That Jews were failed time and again in the 19th and 20th centuries, left with no place to seek shelter from antisemitism. That “a land without a people for a people without a land” – how Israel was sold to my ancestors – was in fact a fallacy.

Today’s priority is to immediately stem the flow of blood. And when one party is a self-described liberal democracy – with far superior military might being used to inflict calculated pain and what the UN describes as a genocide with western backing, it’s clear on whose shoulders sits that responsibility. The other is a stateless people refused the right to change leadership who have long paid the greater price in this war, now facing collective punishment and Israel’s superior ability to kill indiscriminately.

Compassion is what will help halt this bloodshed in the longer term. For decades, civilians on both sides have been failed by political leaders who thrive off conflict and tension. Even now, western leaders defend the breaking of international law, and refuse to call for a ceasefire – the bare minimum. Joe Biden labelled Hamas “the other team”; Rishi Sunak wants Israel to “win”, as if it’s all a game for geopolitical manoeuvring.

For two peoples, once neighbours, few see a path back. As the death count continues to mount, and despair takes a hold, there are at least glimmers of humanity. Much like those grieving in Gaza, it’s those Israelis who personally suffered on 7 October – loved ones killed or taken hostage – who’ve spoken with profound humanity. There are plenty of examples. As the son of Vivian Silver, an Israeli peace activist not heard from since Hamas attacked Kibbutz Be’eri, said of the current assault on Gaza: “She’d be mortified because you can’t cure killed babies with more dead babies.” As the father of one girl taken hostage put it: “Gaza also has casualties … mothers who cry … let’s use this emotion – we are two nations from one father. Let’s make peace; a real peace.”

There are many routes to empathy: how many more have to die for us to find it?

Michael Segalov is a freelance journalist, filmmaker and author

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