The View From Nowhere

Dear J,

You write: “Personally…I begin this way: the depravities are *co-arising*.”

I’m afraid you’re beginning with your conclusion, and then building a framework to justify it.

To suggest some kind of equivalence of depravities between Palestinians and Israelis flies in the face of reality. To take just one slice of the depravity pie, here’s a grim graphic of Gazan and Israeli deaths since October 7^th. This isn’t counting all the other destruction: hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, infrastructure — and everything else that makes life possible. It isn’t counting the unpunished murders in the West Bank, the attack on Iran, and the carnage in Lebanon. Deaths are something we can count, and make charts of. They’re a proxy that illustrates the disparity of power.

Calling the depravity “co-arising” may sound high-minded and even-handed. But what you’re really doing is performing transcendence to avoid landing somewhere uncomfortable. This is not nuanced critical thinking, it’s willful avoidance.

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
— Elie Wiesel (Holocaust survivor & Nobel laureate)

Your “both sides-ism” sounds sophisticated, even spiritually elevated. But framing this as “co-arising depravity” functions as pro-Israel apologetics, whatever the intent. Excluding proportionality, motivation and context doesn’t make you more objective; it makes the comparison false. Yes, if you strip out those factors, both sides have done harmful things. But the flattening is the problem. You must include them. If you don’t, you’re not achieving balance, you’re fabricating it.

You illustrated your post with a yin-yang symbol composed of Israeli and Palestinian flags. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the problem. The yin-yang is explicitly a symbol of balance and complementarity, two equal and interdependent forces in harmonious opposition. It’s a beautiful symbol. It’s also precisely wrong here. The spiritual framing isn’t incidental to your argument, it’s central. It attempts to elevate the observer above the reality of chaos and asymmetric violence into an ethereal realm of serene, symmetrical wisdom. It’s an aesthetically pleasing way to avoid taking sides.

There may come a time when both sides will acknowledge the harms they have done the other, the mutual dehumanization, the cynical leadership. Maybe then there can be talk of how depravity on one side has fueled depravity on the other.

But that moment is not this moment.

This is the moment in which the harms are actively being carried out. This is the moment when, as Wiesel would say, we are called to take sides. I find most repugnant the posture of floating above the fray, styling oneself as “more human, more loving, more whole” while functionally siding with those committing atrocities as we speak. That is not enlightenment. That is cowardice costumed as wisdom.

You write that what Israel is doing in the West Bank is abhorrent. Have you seen what Israel is doing in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran?! That’s even worse.

On the history: you say you don’t claim to know everything about this 78-year war. But you’re repeating identifiable Israeli talking points, and starting the clock in 1948 is itself a choice that biases everything that follows. Try starting with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. The UN did not partition Palestine, it proposed a partition plan. The Jewish Agency declared statehood, then rapidly exceeded the proposed boundaries, ultimately controlling roughly 78% of Mandatory Palestine, well beyond the already-contentious ~56% proposed in the plan. And before that declaration, the program of ethnic cleansing (Plan Dalet) was already underway. It was conducted by organized military and paramilitary forces driving out a population that would ultimately reach 700,000–800,000 displaced people.

The Palestinians didn’t invade what you refer to as “nascent Israel.” What was nascent Israel? Palestine! It wasn’t a case of Palestinians invading Jewish towns, but of Jews invading rural Palestinian villages, driving them out at gunpoint, and appropriating their property. If you think what’s happening in the West Bank is “abhorrent,” what must you think of the much larger ethnic cleansing perpetrated in 1947-1948? Or, for that matter, the one going on now in Lebanon? This isn’t some fringe interpretation — it’s the consensus of serious historians who have worked from the Israeli state archives: Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim and even Benny Morris’ early work. Or, you could expand your knowledge to encompass the Palestinian narrative recounted by Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

Anyway, I’m not going to repeat that whole version of history here, but it’s clear you’re retailing the Israeli narrative that whitewashes what actually happened.

I understand the impulse to look away. The realities are genuinely difficult to absorb: a documented genocide in Gaza, laissez-faire violence in the West Bank, an unprovoked attack on Iran, a bloody invasion of Lebanon. To fully reckon with what Israel is doing requires accepting some uncomfortable truths — about Zionism, about American complicity, about the gap between Israel’s self-image as a beacon of civilization and its actual conduct in the world. That reckoning is hard. But this is a defining moment. Israel has made itself the focal point of a global revulsion that is entirely warranted. In that context, wringing your hands over “co-arising depravity” isn’t nuance — it’s an abdication of moral agency. And I think, on some level, you already know that.

The original post:

The BREAKING OF OUR BRAINS

When we widen attention to include Palestinian depravities - and not only Israel’s - this is somehow a bypass? Personally…I begin this way: the depravities are *co-arising*.

When either side insists, “But the depravities started with *them*”, we crash into impasse. Pity.

I identify as strongly Pro-Palestine AND Pro-Israel. I’m widening the circle of care and culpability (and love) to include both sides.

I sometimes feel an almost desperate longing for both sides to widen their circles of inclusion. Alas, I understand that it’s all to easy to attend primarily to news sources that accent the depravities of one side.

Is it any wonder at all, when we legitimately sense that the blame is mostly/all on “them”.
Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and Netanyahu are out of control. And...so are the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. All of them - in aggregate - are at cause for the disaster.