No Room in My Heart for Palestinians

I imagine there are some folks who will impute to me raging hatred and racism based solely on the title of this piece. They would be wrong. But they would have to make the effort to read my words to understand why.

There are some truths about human beings that we choose to ignore or try to dissuade ourselves about because it is easier to go through this world believing some things, rather than others. On that list of things we ignore or try to dissuade ourselves about I would put the following:

1. No matter how hard we try or want to, human beings do NOT have an infinite capacity to care.

2. Human beings naturally care from inside to outside, from their most intimate relations, i.e., within their family, out to extended family, to friends, colleagues, community members (defined in various ways), and beyond that to more distant people in faraway lands or cultures, who capture our concern for various reasons.

3. Our ability to care with depth or real influence is necessarily diminished by the demands placed on that caring, i.e., if I am a full-time caregiver for a family member, how much emotional/mental/physical bandwidth do I have left to care for others?

None of this is to say that we cannot or do not have generous impulses to care. It is only to say that caring does not exist in infinite quantity in any of us. Yes, it can be replenished, to an extent, but it will always have boundaries, and borders beyond which we cannot — and I would argue should not — go.

This last point is the core focus of this essay on why I have no room in my heart for Palestinians. That was not always the case. But it is definitely the case now. And I neither apologize for that, nor necessarily wish it weren’t so. Let me explain.

Let’s begin with the principles articulated above. The first reminds us that we do not have an infinite capacity to care, and the second links that to how we care, reminding us that humans typically care for those closest to them chiefly defined by intimate, familial relationships, though clearly not only those.

Humans are tribal creatures in many ways. Some of us are literal tribal members, parts of clans defined by religion, geography, and other social descriptors. For those humans, clan comes first. And it makes perfect sense that it should, as that is the all-consuming nature of relationships in those cultural contexts, and often precludes even branching out at all from there to caring about other clans. In fact, such caring might be proscribed, as it might be considered some form of giving comfort to the enemy, as it were.

And if we add the third principle to the mix, we see that life can make demands of us that leave us little if any ability to offer meaningful care to others, beyond what we are already committed to giving within the boundaries of our closest relationships. I recall in this context visiting my father daily for many hours during his confinement to a hospital following lung cancer surgery. I left my home in the morning, only to return many hours later to my autistic son, to whom my absence was a mysterious thing he could not, would not, understand. In between, I tried to offer some vestigial piece of myself to my work life, holding meetings just across from the hospital when I could, but mostly just grateful that no one’s life depended on my getting my work done, or done in exact time.

Those pressures landed on me decades ago, and I still recall them vividly, because the way caring often involves tearing — as in pulling oneself apart into pieces, and pulling oneself to and from and back again among competing demands — is often a feature, and not a bug of true, deep caring. Which is again why caring in a serious, sustained way, is not something that can be done for extraordinary numbers of people, except as an intellectual or performative exercise.

Which leads me still on the road to explaining the title of this piece. My faith tradition, Judaism, puts a premium on peace, on working to repair the fissures in our world. It is in fact an obligation among us to work toward both peace and healing the world, while adhering to the laws and other dictates of Judaism. We are meant to prioritize the least among us — the widow and orphan are specifically mentioned — and to be sure to feed the hungry, to tend to and nurture the earth, and so on and so on.

We are commanded vis a vis the stranger, the sojourner among us. We are commanded vis a vis the sick, the wounded. We are commanded even to break the rules of Shabbat to save a life. And so on. The commands of Judaism are rooted fully and deeply in the command to honor and value life. We offer blessings that seem infinite in their diversity, but all fall under the umbrella of what I would describe as conscious awareness and gratitude. Observant Jews offer blessings over food and wine, upon seeing a rainbow, upon surviving a dangerous or threatening circumstance, etc. etc. I recall my father, Z”L, telling me that I had to go to synagogue to bench gomel, after I’d survived a pretty serious car accident. Conscious awareness and gratitude.

What does any of this have to do with Palestinians? I have long tried to convince myself that there are large numbers of Palestinians who want to live peacefully alongside Israel. This in spite of the many, many horrifying stories I’ve read through the years of gruesome, blood-soaked attacks on Jewish men, women and children by Palestinian terrorists, who are then honored and celebrated as heroes by Palestinian society. Yes, I know one makes peace with enemies not friends, but these enemies seemed to have no collective impulse toward peace, and a few people here and there (and even then, were they sincere?) hardly makes for a movement.

I have also long been bothered by the utterly patronizing, infantilizing way western liberals talk about Palestinians, as if they have no agency, no ability to make serious decisions, and that all we owe them is endless pity, compassion, and forgiveness, no matter their sins, because of course they are not really responsible for them. It’s their dire circumstances, we’re always told. Which is made a lie of when one looks even casually around the world at the arguably far worse circumstances of people who do not engage in even a fraction of those sinful behaviors.

So there has been this seemingly endless accretion of evidence proving that Palestinians do not want peace with Israelis. Yes, there has been some security cooperation between the PA and the IDF, but what matters, what makes for peaceful possibilities, are masses of people who embrace those very possibilities, who demand them such that they become impossible to ignore. Rather, the Palestinians chose every opportunity to de-couple themselves even from the idea of peaceful coexistence, thereby weakening what had been a very robust peace camp in Israel. The sound of peace desired on one side of a painful, traumatized divide but not on the other is the devastating, soul-crushing sound of one hand clapping.

And then came October 7th. The day itself should live in infamy for reasons that should need no explaining. And I will provide none here. But I will remind folks that the terrorists who crossed the border to do their gruesome bloodletting were accompanied by civilians, who not only looted the belongings of murdered Israelis, but participated as well in the killing.

Fast forward now to the winter of 2025, a year and a half after that day of horror and Gazan men, women, children and even babies are out in force to celebrate the handing over to the Red Cross and then to Israel the coffins of a murdered Israeli baby and his toddler brother. Not to celebrate somehow their dignified repatriation, which is an oxymoron in the aftermath of their cold-blooded murder, but to celebrate the fact that those Jewish children had been murdered in the first place.

It is not — IT SHOULD NOT — be possible to care about people who are so detached from what it ought to mean to be human, to be created in the image of any God — theirs or mine — as to be able to celebrate the murder of Jewish babies. We can rewind to the grotesque celebrations in the streets of Gaza on October 7th as dead and wounded Israelis were paraded like trophies before cheering crowds to remind ourselves that this latest abomination in Gaza is not the first.

I operate in the world on simple principles: I control what I put out into the world, not how others receive it. And if you don’t know who you are and what you stand for, others will be happy to step in and tell you. By these principles, Palestinians fall tragically, horrifically short.

They put out into the world glee about slaughter. In their schools, they teach children to hate. They stand for celebrating death. They actually reward the killing of other human beings. Each of these things alone is an offense against God and humanity. Together, they are an unforgiveable indictment. One which obligates me not to work actively against Palestinians, but to hope instead for their withering, like a poisoned branch on an otherwise healthy tree. If the branch cannot reconnect with what is pro-human, pro-life, pro-decency, pro-compassion, then let that branch die off and either be replaced with something life affirming, something that can help nurture the larger tree of humankind, or let the tree carry on without that branch, finding nurture and growth in the water sunlight, and fellowship that all life-affirming and life-treasuring beings need to survive.