Israel and Gaza: Can We Grieve the Loss of All Innocent Life?

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

For a year and a half, we’ve all been watching the horrors that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza, and social media has been saturated with calls for people to declare unequivocally where they stand on the matter:

Are you with the beautiful human beings slaughtered by Hamas, or are you with the radiant lives extinguished by the IDF?

Are you against Islamophobia or are you against anti-Semitism?

Do you stand with Israel or with Palestine?

To some, this is simply a black-and-white zero-sum game with a good side and an evil side, and an endless supply of well-crafted justifications and supporting opinion pieces to support their position. Because of this, there isn't an easy way for people who grieve innocent life wherever it is destroyed to participate in necessary conversations about a path forward.

How can compassionate people with genuine questions and unresolved internal conflicts about the bloodshed and loss of life we’re seeing, engage in productive dialogue without being instantly made into a lazy caricature, dismissed as fully partisan or accused of abject hatred?

If any stated position or expressed emotions are immediately met with accusations of being *insert incendiary label here*, how exactly are we all (no matter where we line up) supposed to navigate something this difficult to wrap our heads and hearts around, something that people have been wrestling with for decades?

In matters of such consequence and complexity, it’s sad that we so easily ascribe motive to people instead of simply engaging with them, listening to them, hearing them, attempting to understand them, seeking the best in them.

Many people are trying to make sense of senseless death, and if we're being honest with each other, very few of us truly have the answers, whether we are world leaders, passionate activists, heartbroken clergy, or simply decent people burdened by the suffering of others. We all have our anger, our pain, our despair, and the hope that this is all simple—but it simply isn’t.

Can we decry and denounce the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel,
while still suggesting Netanyahu’s response is beyond proportionate?
Can we despise what we see as the exploitation and disregard by Hamas and
the IDF of innocent civilians?
Can we be passionately against the vilification and blind hatred of Muslims and
of Jews here and around the world?

When any group of people is being assessed as acceptable collateral damage
or justifiable losses for the cost of stopping terrorism, that isn't something that we should simply accept without at least questioning it as an idea.

Isn’t that dehumanization at the very heart of these disasters to begin with?
At some point, are we merely repeating the pathology of the past?
When we imagine that righteousness is anywhere but with innocent lives, how are we offering anything redemptive to the moral arc of the universe?

Millions of Americans of every religious and political affiliation, and of every nation
of origin and ethnic background, are fully grieving this hatred and bigotry and
death in and around Israel, as well as the discrimination and hate crimes here at home that echo them. We’re all genuinely trying to find a way to properly value innocent human life somewhere without disregarding it elsewhere.

That doesn't mean we have the answers and it doesn’t mean we align neatly with
a clearly defined side, other than the side of innocent life. It simply means we're asking what feels like hard and honest questions about something that the human heart finds impossible to hold.

We should be able to declare that a young Jewish couple being slaughtered in an American street is as vile and inhumane a disregard of life as a Palestinian child starved to death in the rubble that was their home. Whether life is lost with notoriety or in anonymity, it should tear us up equally. There are no lesser degrees of brutality, no trauma competition to win.

I believe that we can choose the side of innocent humanity whenever it is violated, we can choose to oppose discrimination and bigotry of every kind, and that will place us in the messy complexity of ambiguity that admits that the neatness of clear factions and sides simply won’t do.

I believe that when the carnage of violence visits the planet, we can stand on the side of peace.

Is this possible?

If it isn’t, hundreds of years from now, people will still be here asking the same questions, trafficking in the same bigotry, grieving senseless killing, and making the same lazy and dangerous assertions about strangers.

That would be a tragedy.

How do you navigate this reality? Do you find it difficult to hold the scope of this kind of grief or to express it in a way that feels helpful? Let me know in the comments.