Two peoples, two truths, two traumas

A people so traumatised, hounded out of every corner of the earth, generation after generation, from pogroms to genocide, find refuge in a land promised by colonial mandate and steeped in scriptural meaning: the last place they ruled, several thousands of years ago. Against all odds, they build life from the ashes. In their new home they erect tents, form communes, battle disease, droughts, and sieges, all in service of one hope: that their children will finally know safety. But the land was not empty. In the thousands of years since most Jews had left it, others had come to call it home. Both peoples lay claim to the same land, both claiming indigeneity, and neither willing to move. And so begins the tragedy that leads us to the present.

Israel’s identity was forged not just by history, but by trauma. Survivors of genocide created a state that would never again allow Jews to be defenceless. That trauma produced an unparalleled security apparatus. It is no surprise that the world’s most persecuted people, once stateless, would come to create the world’s most security-driven state.

And yet, the Palestinians had their own collective trauma. Their modern political identity was born in the rubble of empire and the humiliation of lost sovereignty. The fall of the Ottoman Caliphate and the imposition of Western mandates fractured the Muslim world. Across this fractured world, Islamic revivalism began to take hold—not least among Palestinian factions. Hamas’s covenant openly claims the entire land of Israel as Islamic territory, essential to the return of Islamic governance. Resistance, pride, and pain merged into a theology of righteous defiance.

Wars followed. Victimhood calcified into identity. Israel, ever on the alert, began to see all Palestinians through the lens of existential threat. Palestinian leadership, meanwhile, became increasingly incapable of compromise, fragmented and often extremist. Figurative and literal walls went up. The result? A people who rule, yet feel besieged. And a people who are ruled, yet feel righteous. No trust, no justice, no true vision of shared peace. And so the Palestinian people were pushed into zones where they could self-manage but never fully become emancipated and sovereign.

On October 7th 2023, Hamas breached Israel’s defences and massacred 1200 civilians and soldiers. Many of the civilian victims were young festival goers. The footage hit something deep and visceral, as we looked on and thought: that could have been me. “Never again” fell silent as all that could be felt was a deep awareness that “again” was always inevitable.

The massacre has not only affected every Israeli, but Jews everywhere. Every single manifestation of antisemitism, from ruling the world to the blood libel, from being inherently evil to being related to apes – every age-old trope, religious or racist, every wild right- and left-wing conspiracy theory is now more popular and widespread than ever.

Since Hamas began this war, more than 60,000 Palestinians are reported by the Hamas Health Ministry to have been killed in Gaza, including around 17,000 children. The figures differ depending on who you ask. But whichever way you cut it, it’s abhorrently high. Entire families have been buried under rubble; hospitals, schools, and homes lie in ruins. Gaza is not just being bombed, it is being unmade.

Let me be unequivocal: I believe Hamas must be dismantled. The attacks of October 7th  were not “resistance”. They were an attempted genocide, fuelled by an antisemitic, supremacist, genocidal ideology. But the elimination of Hamas cannot come at any cost. International law, and the Geneva Conventions in particular, draw hard lines around what is permissible in war. Civilian life is not collateral. It is protected. Israel has not only blurred those lines, it has crossed them again and again.

To recognise this is not to equivocate. It is to step out of one’s echo chamber, to risk critique and isolation. To risk ostracising friends and colleagues who are too hurt right now to step back, observe, and reflect.  It is to accept that this is not a zero-sum game of moral purity. This is a tragedy in which two peoples, both shaped by generational trauma, now wield that trauma as political currency. Israel, born from genocide, has internalised a survivalist ethos so fiercely that any perceived threat justifies overwhelming force. Palestinians, shaped by loss and siege, see their own suffering as proof of righteousness. They are locked in a cycle of victimhood and retaliatory violence, each act feeding the next.

This conflict is not unlike the Greek tragedy of the House of Atreus. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter. His wife, Clytemnestra, murders him in revenge. Their son, Orestes, kills her. Each act of violence is justified by the last. Each step deeper into vengeance claimed as moral debt. Myth, in its timelessness, warns us: when trauma becomes inheritance, even justice can rot into cruelty.

And yet aren’t myths meant to teach us something?

Today we are told we must choose. Either we back Israel unconditionally, or we endorse Hamas. If we see Israeli fear as real, we must deny Palestinian humanity. These are false choices. And the cost of accepting them is our own moral collapse. Indeed, to take a “pro” stance—to be for one side in absolutist terms—is to step into the myth as a complicit player. As yet another ceasefire is drawn up, the next test will be who one argues broke it first; depending on the tribe the answer is already known, no matter the fact.

We are so fluent now in outrage that we have forgotten how to grieve responsibly. So loyal to our ideological tribes that we’ve lost the ability to hold two truths at once. It is not antisemitic to call some of Israel’s actions war crimes. But it is antisemitic to cheer on Hamas as liberators or to deny the trauma of Jewish history. It is not Islamophobic to condemn Islamist ideologies and their inherent antisemitism. But it is Islamophobic to suspect every Muslim of complicity. The ability to distinguish between state, religion, ideology, and individual is collapsing, and in that collapse, hatred finds its home.

If we want a future that doesn’t repeat the past, we need to reject the “pro”. We need to rebuild a moral language that allows us to name injustice, wherever it comes from, without fear of being exiled. That means holding Israel accountable for its conduct, not despite our concern for Jewish safety, but because of it. That means standing with Palestinians in their right to human dignity, while never justifying or excusing the terrorism carried out in their name. It means remembering that justice cannot be tribal. That the only just solution, despite all its challenges and inevitable birthing pains, is a two state solution. External players need to put justice over their investments in the perpetuation of hostilities, recognising that “peace” without justice is merely a ceasefire between cycles of grief.

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