It’s become almost trite for me to start by saying that my words will almost certainly provoke discomfort for many. Among Jews. Among Muslims. Among Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans alike. Perhaps even you.

But I offset that discomfort by reminding myself that I’m not trying to offend anyone (although I don’t mind offending some folks; rather, I’m writing because, to me, in most ways, silence is very much complicity, and I very much refuse to be complicit.

In recent weeks, after an all-too-brief respite, we’ve managed to start up yet again the endlessly shitty carousel of suffering between Palestinians and Israelis.

And as usual, we’re not just killing people (as if that weren’t bad enough), we’re also working incredibly hard to unravel the moral fabric and ethical foundations of two long-suffering peoples, diminish their humanity, harden their hearts, and distort the contours of their souls even more than we already have.

Violence. Cruel, sustained, and endlessly cyclical, it has transubstantiated the unspeakable and unimaginable into the mundane and routine.

We have mainstreamed cruelty and snapped the scales of Justice across our knee, as we internalize a false and toxic truth that hatred is an inevitable destiny with an inescapable gravity.

We have convinced ourselves that compassion is weakness and that death and suffering have meaning or purpose.

We have turned the roll call of the dead into fodder for a Trauma Olympics that weaponizes and gamifies grief and suffering.

It is easy to say, “They hate each other… they always have, so let them kill each other; what difference does it make?”

But it’s not just a stupid and backward regional struggle: it’s a conflict that has exposed the moral failings of a world that is more comfortable with platitudes and tut-tutting than pushing the sides towards a solution.

It’s a purulent and festering global wound that weeps and bleeds through borders, corrupting discourse and poisoning hope everywhere, whether in Jerusalem, Ramallah, New York, London, or any other city.

Can we ever learn to focus on a bigger picture that centers our shared humanity and resists needless suffering and loss?

There is an all-too-familiar rhythm to the devastation.

A cadence that almost feels rehearsed.

Violence. Retaliatory violence. Eulogies. Denials. Statements. Silence. Repeat ad nauseam.

This is a tragic repertory at a theater of suffering, where the actors change, but the script is a painfully predictable call-and-response written in the blood of innocents.

We see Israel’s rightwing government violently suppressing peaceful Israeli protesters demanding an end to aggressive settlement expansion and violence in Palestinian territories, with police using excessive force, detentions, and intimidation tactics to silence dissent.

Simultaneously (but far more egregiously), we see Hamas violently cracking down on Palestinian protesters in Gaza who bravely opposed Hamas’s oppressive governance, executing demonstrators under false accusations of treason to silence and intimidate their critics.

It is an institutionalized and embedded brutality and callousness that highlights a shared crisis of accountability and morality.

To those pro-Israeli readers who would respond with “…but Israel is at war…” and to those pro-Palestinian readers who would respond with “…but Hamas is a legitimate resistance…”

No. This is not war. This is war crimes. This is hatred. Unleashed. Unmasked. Unrestrained.

And while Israel’s resources and martial capabilities have allowed it to inflict a staggeringly disproportionate toll upon the Palestinians, it’s important, to be honest and acknowledge that Hamas would readily bring the same levels of senseless and vengeful violence to Israel if they had the same resources and capabilities.

Hamas is not more just or more noble; they are only less equipped and less capable, and what they lack in firepower and ability, they make up for in a fervor that has fanned the violence and consumed the lives of innocents.

This is not a contest of saints and sinners. It is a confrontation between failed visions of the world, each clinging to trauma like a birthright and wielding memory and religious fanaticism as a weapon.

Across Israel, the promise of democracy falters. Extremism festers. The judiciary bends. Dissent is criminalized. Nationalism eclipses decency.

Across Gaza, in the midst of death and destruction, the chant is for life. Against Hamas. For bread. For breath. For life.

“We want to live,” they say — and the simplicity of that cry should humble every policymaker, every pundit, every person.

Hamas answers that call with bullets and oppression, dragging protesters from the streets, silencing dissent with the barrel of a gun, and executing their own people not for treason but for daring to hope for something better.

Just as Israel’s leaders treat calls for equity as existential threats, Hamas treats pleas for freedom as insubordination.

The mirror has no agenda. It’s a cold and uninflected window that reflects the monstrosities on both sides; people are being ground beneath the same machinery of cruelty and monomaniacal fanaticism.

We see the future mortgaged to pay the debts of the egos of the past and present while the list of inhumane transgressions grows unbearably long.

Rockets fly indiscriminately toward cities. Settlers descend upon villages while soldiers stand as silent witnesses. Activists disappear into the night. Teens rot in prison for refusing to participate in injustice. Death is glorified. Grief is repurposed for propaganda. Starvation becomes a strategy. Suffering is weaponized and propagandized to serve the organs of the state.

And every day, we tacitly normalize this reality with our inaction

I’m not a person of moral purity.

I am not without pride, nor am I immune to the faults I see in others.

But I am honest with myself and open to my failings.

And after years of carrying the weight, that weight has clearly become unbearable, I feel exhausted and broken.

My identity and pride as a Palestinian-American is not something I apologize for, but neither will I apologize for a moral compass that points me towards a truer north that sees failures on every side.

In the end, one of the things that gives me comfort is the realization that it is not Palestinians or Israelis.

It is Palestinians and Israelis.

It is not Muslim versus Christian versus Jew.

It is human beings, each endowed with dignity, each deserving peace, each deserving safety, each deserving a future, and all of whom must be seen, not as tools of politics or pawns of tyrants but as bearers of the divine privileges that are attached to the very fact of being human.

All of them are fighting against a mean and ungenerous vision of the world that places winning above thriving, tribal supremacy over tolerance, and hatred over love.

I am also comforted by the fact that many are stepping up. Many are pushing against the weight of historical grievance and choosing to cast a generous and open-hearted light into corners long overwhelmed by darkness.

People like my friends Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, each having buried loved ones lost to war, now plant seeds of peace and cautious optimism in the bitter soil of their grief and sadness.

People like my friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gazan native whose family was decimated by the war, now leading the Realign for Palestine effort who dares to speak truths even when doing those truths offend the orthodoxy of pain and suffering as currency.

People like my friend Nadav Weiman of Breaking the Silence, who, because of his first-hand experience as an elite unit sniper in the IDF, leads an organization that is trying to shine a light on the moral and ethical corrosion that the occupation has spread through the IDF.

People like my friends, Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood, founders of Standing Together, who are working for a greater and more equitable existence for both Palestinians under occupation and the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

My friends are not speaking from a place of unrealistic delusion.

They are not speaking from a place of naïve kumbaya progressivism.

My friends are not waiting for leaders.

They are becoming them.

They are the architects of a future we can still choose.

So, yes, the grief is heavy.

And yes, the injustice is loud.

But I still cling to a fervent belief in Dr. King’s vision of a moral universe that bends toward justice.

And a belief that the future is not just something designed by cynics.

It can be shaped as well by the stubborn-hearted, by those who refuse to surrender to what is and instead work for what must be.

Whatever you believe — whether in scripture or skepticism — our traditions all point toward mercy.

Toward equity.

Toward tolerance.

Toward peace.

Toward life.

The Torah tells us that those who save one life are as those who save the world.

The Quran tells us that those who kill one human unjustly are killing all of humanity.

The Bible tells us that our shared God of Abraham blesses the peacemakers as he would his children.

And even if you hold to none of these faiths, there is still the enduring truth that our lives are entangled, that our freedoms are mutual, and that our future is only a shared one.

We must build a new ethic — an ethic that elevates empathy above vengeance, refuses to call cruelty strength, and rejects supremacy, whether it drapes itself in a flag or a scripture.

Decency is not weakness.

It is the last line of defense against barbarism.

We must say that civilians are never acceptable targets. Trauma is not a crown. Pain does not grant license. All human life holds equal weight. And freedom for one cannot come through the subjugation of another.

If you cannot mourn both Palestinian and Israeli dead, your vision is partial.

If you cannot condemn both occupation and terrorism, your justice is performative and incomplete.

If you believe your people alone carry the imprimatur of righteousness and the flag of truth, you are not fighting for peace. You are fighting for dominance.

Extremists have had their turn. Decades of it. And they’ve given us rubble and ruin: grief and graves.

We can choose something else. Something higher. A future where safety is not purchased with subjugation. Where history is remembered but not weaponized. Where dignity is shared, not hoarded.

I long for a final chapter, if we can ever find the courage to write it, that is written by those who yearn not to conquer but to coexist and thrive and grow together, not by those who wish to retaliate but by those who want to reconcile and create.

Yes, it is a hard path.

Yes, it is a steep path.

But if we do not climb it, then we doom our children to inherit our stagnation and fill their mouths with the ash of death and loss.

Because if we do not rise to defend a world where everyone can live in dignity — truly live — then what legacy have we earned? What faith have we betrayed?

Hope is not weakness. Hope is not naivety. Hope is defiance.

And hope is a verb.

Let us hope together and banish the darkness together.