Reconciling Being Jewish with the Siege of Gaza

May the Palestinians and Jews find a home, even if much of the world doesn’t want them, aka us. We are each other.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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(Photo by Paul Hennesy/Anadolu via Getty Images)

On Sundays, as a child, I’d watch my favorite TV show, “Abbott and Costello.” Then I’d watch whatever offerings Channel 13 (PBS in New York) had on the Holocaust. I would steep myself in images of emaciated bodies in dead piles. Ovens. Heaps of glasses and shoes. It was all in black and white, and it was deeply upsetting, yet somehow satisfying in the part of myself that needed to see the grisly details. It was the 1980s — only 40 years out from the genocide. I lived among older people with tattoos on their forearms. And I grew up with a kind of Zionism that believed the Jewish community had to settle in Palestine because it was their only chance at survival. I read too much Leon Uris.

Fast-forward to the 2010s. I was working on women’s rights as a journalist and made friends with a 70-something-year-old Palestinian advocate. She agreed to my request to tutor me on the history of Palestine, which would upend everything I thought was true as a child. I would, around the same time, also meet cab drivers and others in Jordan and Lebanon who said that they held keys to houses that were in Palestine, but were now in Israel. Ghost keys.

I’ve spent decades reading about the Holocaust, soaking up authors like Primo Levi, then veering into fictional accounts of the camps in order to try to feel what it may have been like. I could not get enough. Guilt reading, maybe. I badly wanted to understand what my own Eastern European family may had endured during the war. You could call it a generalized sense of morbidity except for the fact that I was not yet obsessing over other genocides (which I would do later in an attempt to understand how such horrors are constructed).

Nothing was too painful to read. It was like constantly picking at a scab.

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In October 2023, I visited Auschwitz. I won’t get into many specifics here, but I will say that two things have never left my mind. One was the rows of holes in long concrete slabs where hundreds of people were forced to go to the bathroom a few minutes at a time. In a ready-made horse stable. It was beyond bleak. The other was standing on the tracks of arriving trains at Birkenau, which are the tracks you’ve seen in multiple movies, although it was not as strongly upsetting as another moment. This one happened as I was visiting the final bunkers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On the tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Photo by Achille Aboud)

Most tourists don’t go to Birkenau, which is much, much larger than Auschwitz I and where the massive crematoria were. But I was on a journalism tour, and I visited everything. We meandered through the barracks where men and women had slept in wooden beds only a few feet from the next layer. We saw their toilets, which were way too few for the hundreds held in the barracks. But those bathrooms were luxurious compared to what I saw at Birkenau with the lengths of concrete holes for toilets.

At the end of our hours and hours of tours, our guide walked us into the original Birkenau barracks, which were constructed of stone taken from the surrounding village’s houses.

We entered and I gasped. Light-gray stones jaggedly constructed each bunk, where women slept at least four to a bed, three deep. It was gut-tearing, thinking of women ensconced within these primordial stones all night amid the lice and infections that surrounded them. Terrifying. The utter bleakness. My stomach clenched and does again now just thinking of it.

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In the present day, watching the horrors that Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, is perpetrating on Palestinians in Gaza, my heart is being torn out yet again. I hate the man. Hate. Already did before this, but exceptionally now. He has single-handedly ruined any good will the Jews have had in the world (which, granted, has never been much). He has created generations of Palestinians who deservedly hate Israelis (or, more specifically, deservedly hate the Israeli government), and with that comes the global hatred of all Jews, even liberal ones like me. It’s disgusting.

It’s also been confusing. I know so much about what was done to us in the Holocaust. My trip to Auschwitz made it so that I can’t read another novel again about it — what I witnessed was so much worse than I’d imagined — and it’s made me furious that Netanyahu has intensified the divide between Jews and Palestinians, Israelis and Muslims.

As someone who has spent more than a decade reporting on war crimes, I see war crimes in what Israel is doing to Gaza.

I feel anger at what the Israeli government has created — a cauldron of hatred against Jews everywhere. I can’t, in good conscience, not speak out against the abuse and oppression of the Palestinians right now. After Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s nascent response, I said to my father, born during World War II, that this was terrible, Israel’s reaction. That it was outsized. He argued that Israel had a right to respond to a terrorist attack. And I understood that his Zionist background supported this. But I pushed back. I felt I was watching the seeds of what could become genocide.

I’ve since talked to my father, who now agrees with me: this is overkill, and reprehensible.

It’s a nightmarish thing that generations have volleyed this violence back and forth over a small piece of land for about 100 years. This is not me saying that Palestinians or Israelis are in the right or wrong in the bigger sense. Honestly, I don’t know anymore. What I do know is that being a reformed Jew who doesn’t practice religion in the U.S. means being frightened by all the hatred.

A two-state solution requires a deep reckoning by both sides. The problem with that, beyond the obvious, is that it also requires a worldwide reckoning of the diaspora of Jews and Palestinians, who have been placed in refugee camps in countries like Lebanon, which refuse Palestinians the right to work or any kind of statehood. The politics is some of the most complicated of our time. The sad thing is that we are not so different. Both Jews and Muslims have been historically rejected by too many countries, cast out and unable to find a home.

We all deserve to feel at home. May this deadly war against civilian Palestinians end soon, and may they, and the rest of us, find a home someplace in the world, even if much of the world doesn’t want them, aka us. We are each other.

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