On expanding our circle of concern and seeing ourselves in others

You may have noticed I haven’t written much lately. Like so many, I have been consumed with thoughts of the Middle East. So consumed that it has felt impossible to write about anything else. It has also felt impossible to write about what’s happening: the emotional experience is so big, the trauma is so real, the history is so complex, and the reality on the ground is so unknown and so misunderstood by so many. It feels impossible to write anything comprehensive, and yet to write about certain aspects and not others is to invite assumption and misunderstanding. I have been struggling with the toxicity of the social media discourse, and have mostly shied away from speaking about the conflict publicly. But I am an organizer, and first entered politics through activism against the Iraq War in 2003. So for me, it feels important to give voice to my experience and perspective on what’s happening, even though I may do so imperfectly.

The last seven weeks have been heavy, heartbreaking, and alienating. The horrific atrocities and brutal attacks on Israeli civilians perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th. More than 1,200 killed. More than 200 taken hostage. The horrific and indefensible retaliatory attacks on Palestinian civilians perpetrated by Netanyahu’s government in the subsequent weeks. More than 13,000 killed, among which an estimated 6,000 were children. Another 1.7 million displaced. The indiscriminate violence, collective punishment, and blatant violations of international law supported by our own government. The conflation of people and their governments. And the global rise of both antisemitism and Islamaphobia. It has me thinking a lot about the concept of belonging, who we place inside our circle of concern, and who we cast outside of it.

I am Jewish, Ashkenazi on my mother’s side. Her great grandparents fled the pogroms of Russia and immigrated to America, changing their name from Aranovich to Aranow when they arrived at Ellis Island. I was raised in a home without religion, and being Jewish has never been a big part of my identity. I have a Welsh surname (my father’s), blue eyes, blonde-ish hair, and fair skin. As a little girl, I desperately wanted to look like my mother. I got her cheekbones, her lips, and her almond shaped eyes, but not her olive skin, her hazel eyes, or her thick brown hair. In fifth grade, I brought blinis to school for heritage day, and a teacher reacted by saying, “huh, you don’t look Jewish!” That was the first, but not the last time I heard that.

Mom and me during a summer vacation in South Carolina…(I was apparently very frightened of this fish)

The summer after sixth grade, my parents took us to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and I remember entering the room filled with shoes of children who had been murdered by the Nazis. My brother, three years younger than me, was overwhelmed and began to cry, and I remember thinking that although I had never felt Jewish, if I had been born fifty years earlier in Europe instead of America, those shoes might have been mine.

It was the first time I’d had a thought like that. I imagine it’s not dissimilar from the thoughts so many Jews had as they learned about the abduction of children taken as hostages on October 7th, or the thoughts Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs have had in recent weeks as bombs have rained down on homes, schools, refugee camps, and hospital campuses in Gaza. That might have been me, that might have been my child…Even worse, many Jews, Muslims, and Arabs around the world are also thinking, “I could be next…my child could be next” and that fear is grounded in a reality where angry mobs show up to airports looking for Israeli passengers and Palestinian university students are shot for wearing keffiyehs in Vermont. We don’t get to choose where we’re born, what we look like, or what kind of blood courses through our veins, but some people will decide that these things determine how much our lives are worth, who deserves to live, and who deserves to die.

People always seem surprised to learn about my ethnic background. I generally paid it little mind myself, until we moved from the city to the suburbs when I was in first grade, and all of the things that were different about my family suddenly came into stark view. Nearly every child at my new elementary school was white and Christian. Most of my friends’ moms stayed at home. Mine worked as a clinical psychologist. Their families went to church every Sunday. My parents were something between atheist and agnostic. My family had a Christmas tree every year, but my parents were clear that this was to be celebrated as a family holiday, not a religious one. On Christmas Eve, we went to the movies and alternated between our favorite tapas restaurant (Emilio’s) and our favorite Chinese restaurant (Yen’s). As a kid, I didn’t feel like I belonged to any group. I still don’t. It can be lonely sometimes. I’ve had some very lonely moments lately. But not belonging to a group means I can also see myself in many people, and I now know that is a gift. I find myself reflecting on this a lot lately.

Ramallah covered in 20 inches of snow during a storm in December of 2013

About ten years ago, I travelled to the Middle East for the first time. After the Obama re-election campaign, I was working at a mission-driven consulting firm, and my team was hired to train and work with organizers in Israel and Palestine who were building a movement for a two-state solution. That experience was too big for me to distill neatly. Lately, memories from that time have come flooding back: eating labneh on a beach in Tel Aviv while staring into the Mediterranean, wandering the cobble stone streets of Old Jaffa in search of dinner, driving through the A, B, and C zones of the West Bank as the realities of the occupation began to wash over me, tasting knafeh for the first time when a colleague took us to visit his home town of Nablus, abandoning a car in the streets of Ramallah during a once-in-a-century snow storm, drinking arak and talking late into the night about what it would take for things to meaningfully change, and the vacuum of transformational leadership in both Israel and Palestine.

I could tell you a dozen stories about the inspiring and resilient people I met, the sacrifices they made, the injustices they suffered, and what I learned from them in the subsequent months. But the biggest lessons are the things that are easy to know intellectually and difficult to embrace emotionally and in context: the only way to a better future requires us to see ourselves in the people who don’t look/pray/live like us, even and especially when old wounds are re-opened, when old traumas are re-lived, when our grief is fresh, and our own safety feels fragile. So much of our lives is determined by the accident of where we are born and where we grow up, and we must not forget that. There is real evil and hatred in the world, but hatred is learned, and it begins with allowing fear to harden our hearts. People choose war when they feel vulnerable and desperate, and war may end things but it doesn’t solve things. It always comes at an immeasurable human cost, and there is no glory in it. Indiscriminate violence in the name of provocation is indefensible and short-sighted, and so too is indiscriminate violence in the name of deterrence. Every shot, every bomb, every rocket brings more trauma that will accumulate and be passed on to the next generation.

I don’t know what the long-term answer to this conflict is, but I know it has to start with expanding our circle of concern, refusing to dehumanize, and insisting on seeing ourselves in others, even in those we fear.

It is completely natural to relate to things through the lens of our own experience, to feel psychological proximity to people who share our attributes and experiences. We’re wired for it. It is much more difficult to feel that kind of proximity to people with different attributes and experiences, but in so many ways, that is the call of our time.

We could all be that Israeli parent praying for their child to be returned by Hamas. We could all be that Palestinian parent praying their child is still alive under the rubble in Gaza. No good will come of more violence. Too many lives have been lost already. I’m not a religious person, but I will continue to wake up every morning praying for a real and lasting ceasefire, not just a pause.

There is so much more to say about the geo-political context of this conflict, the root causes, how we got here, and the many perspectives on long-term pathways to peace and justice. Rather than write about these things today, I’ll leave you with a few links to resources I’ve appreciated in recent weeks.

-Ezra Klein has, in my opinion, done the best work of his life with his recent podcasts. I am profoundly grateful that he is using his voice and his platform in such a thoughtful and meaningful way. I recommend making your way through them sequentially:

• October 18: Israel is Giving Hamas What it Wants

• October 24: The Jewish Left is Trying to Hold Two Thoughts at Once

• October 31: If Not This, Then What Should Israel do?

• November 3: She Polled Gazans on October 6. Here’s What She Found.

• November 7: Why Palestinians Feel They’ve Been ‘Duped’

• November 10: What Israelis Fear the World Does Not Understand

• November 17: The Sermons I Needed to Hear Right Now

• November 21: The Best Primer I’ve Heard on Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts

-A timeline of Israel and Palestine’s complicated history by Nicole Narea at Vox

-The Israel-Hamas deal is not a real ceasefire by Zack Beauchamp at Vox

-Bess Kalb has written beautifully about her experience on her Substack, The Grudge Report

-The Alliance for Middle East Peace is a coalition of over 160 organizations and thousands of Israelis and Palestinians committed to building peace, justice, and equality. Their website has numerous resources for learning and contributing to positive Israeli-Palestinian partnership efforts on the ground.

-Doctors Without Borders is doing some of the most important work in the region, and as always, has demonstrated moral leadership throughout this time of crisis. I’ll personally match up to $500 in donations through Friday (send or comment with a screenshot of your donation receipt).