A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a headline that read, "Blaming Hamas for Gazans' Suffering, Many Israelis Feel Little Sympathy."
Shortly after, New York Magazine ran an essay by Ayelet Waldman, which claimed that "for the majority of Jewish Israelis, the only grief they can feel is their own, the only dead worth mourning are their own."
The "unsympathetic Israeli" has become a trope in its own right, but in reality, many Israelis do care about the plight of civilian Palestinians in Gaza. There are peace activists, people who work for NGOs and human rights lawyers who have made this the center of their lives and politics. There are Israelis protesting every week to end the war, not just because they want the hostages to come home, but also because they want safety for people on both sides of the conflict.
If there are fewer such people in Israel today than there were on October 6th, it's because a number of them - like peace activist Vivian Silver - were slaughtered by Hamas militants on October 7th. Others, like Naama Levy, also a peace activist, were kidnapped. In the video of her capture, we can hear her begging for mercy, pleading "I have friends in Palestine." Others were simply disillusioned, like Batia Holin of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who - after partnering with a Gazan man on an art exhibit designed to foster partnership and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians - discovered that he had participated in the Hamas invasion.
To be fair, there are also Israelis who don't feel sympathy for the Palestinians. With enemies in both the north and south, with hostages still trapped in Gaza, with memories of Hamas barbarity still painfully and traumatically fresh, most Israelis are primarily concerned with their own families, their own people, their own fear, and their own grief.
This doesn't make them bad people. It simply means that they are human.
We might ask who Israel is being compared to here. Is there some other people that displays a greater amount of sympathy towards its enemies in wartime, compared to whom Israelis seem uncaring?
Certainly not Americans, who were mostly apathetic and, in many cases, completely unaware during America's twenty-odd years of war in the Middle East. Certainly not Palestinians, who danced in the streets on October 7th. As is usually the case, this absurd standard seems to be applied exclusively to Israel.
Someone once said that Israel is the only country in the world expected to be a Christian nation. In the past nine months, Israel has been told to "turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy." Israelis are right to reject this hypocritical advice. With Iranian proxy armies coming at us from all sides, we have no more cheeks to turn.
If people can't understand that, perhaps it is because they don't know what it's like to live in a country threatened with destruction, to witness whole towns massacred by invaders, or to have one's border pushed back by rocket fire.
It wouldn't kill them to have a little sympathy.
