I am deeply pained by the events unfolding in Israel and Gaza. And I am filled with sadness and trepidation as I share my perspective on this war because it seems to challenge the dominant narrative here in the U.S. However, as a therapist and a Jew, part of my work is to recognize blind spots, particularly when they result in privileging one perspective over another in ways that can be harmful. I am aware of the blind spots, of the particular distortion of realities and others’ humanity that my own socialization, history and experience have embedded in me, and I know I have caused harm because of them. I do not have answers, but I do have a heart filled with longing for us to do and be better as well as ongoing experiences of a radical change in my own understanding of the world as a result of deep, generative listening.

Many of my Jewish brothers and sisters have written with grief and rage about Hamas’ brutal attacks on Israeli civilians, the murder, rape and hostage-taking of Israeli men, women and children. The news and social media are full of the wrenching details. The unhealed wound of Jew-hatred and the collective memory of the racist destruction of our people in the 20th century and before, have been reignited and many of us feel an ancient fear, rooted in our historical reality, that the world will not care. We Jews have been primed to be on the lookout for signs of our own annihilation. The trauma of the Holocaust is still fresh for many. As a Jew and as a human being, I am horrified. My people are hurting. My people are terrified and confused. They are separated from those they love and don’t know how to find them or if they’re still alive. Everyone knows someone who was killed.

I have many friends and acquaintances in Israel and I know the emotional importance of that country to so many Jewish Americans. I have spent time in Israel and experienced a connection I know many Jews share to some spiritual sense of home, homeland, refuge, the sacred, the holy, a place of belonging and rootedness. I understand the deep need we Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of European descent) felt following the Holocaust for a place where, being the majority, we would never again suffer state-sanctioned antisemitic violence, murder, or exile. The depth of our collective outrage and pain make sense to me.

When I was going through an emotional and psychological crisis of my own in my early twenties, I found refuge in an orthodox Jewish community that had egalitarian aspirations and could make room, to varying degrees, for me as a lesbian. Estranged from my own parents at the time, this community took me in, supported me, loved me, and raised me. As I healed and grew and entered my 30’s, I began to notice a distinct pressure within that community to support the Israeli government no matter what it did. I was not yet race-conscious and did not know yet what it meant to be white in America, but I did feel an instinctual alarm at and discomfort with the tone some of my friends took in talking about Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims. I bristled at what seemed to me to be racist, rigid, black-and-white rhetoric when it came to relations between Israel and Palestine. In these circles, “Palestinian” seemed all too often to be equated with “terrorist” or “enemy.” I began to sense in the community an insularity and inflexible dogmatism that didn’t sit right for me and did not align with my understanding of Jewish teachings.

I was raised in a politically liberal family with academic-activist parents. To me, at the core of Judaism is a command to stand with the oppressed, the dispossessed and the displaced. I take seriously the story of Exodus, a story of enslavement and liberation from bondage. And yet I never asked myself the question: Who was displaced, oppressed or dispossessed to provide that sense of refuge and belonging that the existence of the state of Israel gave me as an Ashkenazi American Jew?

In my late 30’s, I met and fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant Black woman. We have been married now for 14 years. A whole new journey of awakening began for me as I was forced to reckon with my own racial identity as a white person born and raised in the U.S. Until then, I had seen myself as Jewish, not white. I now began to discover and uncover all the ways I had been socialized within a white supremacist culture. I began to see my own deeply engrained racism, the ways I unconsciously and often unintentionally participate in silencing, marginalizing and harming Black folks, the assumptions I make about the world and how it works because I am always looking through my white racial frame, and the privilege the color of my skin affords me to move through the world in ways that generally lift me up (despite the fact that I am Jewish) and confirm to me that I have value, that I deserve to exist and be seen. I worked hard to be able to hear my wife’s experience, to allow myself to be changed by what she told me, and to share with her the realities of my own experience as a white person.

Through our marriage and through my continuing conversation with others about race, as well as my ongoing study and internal reflection and exploration, I have come to learn one very important, if difficult, truth: I have enormous blind spots. As a white American, I have been conditioned to view the world through a very particular lens that denies or diminishes Black people’s suffering, their experience, their value, their very being, and that centers and uplifts my own and other white folks’ experience, value, suffering, and personhood. As a Jewish American, I have also been conditioned to view the state of Israel as necessary for the survival of the Jewish people and therefore, to view objection to the Israeli government’s actions, especially its actions towards Arabs and Palestinians, as threatening and even antisemitic. Accompanying the fierceness of the survival imperative embedded in this conditioning is often a perspective that denies or diminishes the experience, suffering and humanity of Arab and/or Palestinian people.

I am looking, then, at the current violence in Israel and Gaza with new eyes.

Here at home, the president has thrown his full support behind Israel and is asking for massive amounts of money to arm Israel’s retaliation. Almost the entire congress and senate on both sides have voiced loud support for Israel and condemned Hamas’ atrocities as antisemitic terrorism and war crimes. The president has provided some mild cautionary rhetoric about the need to allow access to humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, but he has done little of substance to respond to the outcry of Arabs and Palestinians at home or abroad for compassion towards the innocent civilians of Gaza. Many Palestinians feel that their lives, their deaths, and their pain do not matter.

My fellow Jews demand I take a side. Do you stand with Israel? Or are you pro-Palestinian? My heart breaks with this demand. As a human being and a Jew who was taught that all life is sacred, how can I not be for the life, humanity, dignity and survival of both Israelis and Palestinians? I will not declare myself pro-Israel if that means being anti-Palestinian. I am angry at the bullying I see happening all over the world to take a side. I abhor terrorism. What Hamas did was horrifying and unacceptable. I am devastated by the violence and pain inflicted by Hamas on the people of Israel. I am also horrified by what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. I stand against hatred and violence towards any civilian.

And so I am deeply troubled by the warped racist socialization that has led so many of my fellow Jews in Israel and around the world to close their hearts and minds to the suffering of our Palestinian cousins. How is it that Palestinian suffering goes unmentioned alongside the suffering of Israelis? Why is it seen as antisemitic for me to condemn in the strongest terms the brutality of Hamas while also condemning in the strongest terms the Israeli government’s violence against the civilian population of Palestinians in Gaza? How does more violence become the solution to violence? Where is our moral conscience?

And — where are my Jewish American brothers and sisters when Black lives here at home are being threatened? The listservs of my professional and alumni organizations are lit up with outrage and pain over the murder of unarmed Jews in Israel along with demands that these organizations make a public statement condemning Hamas’ terrorism. Why is there no outrage at the daily terrorism against unarmed Black Americans here in the U.S. or the current and continuing violence towards unarmed Palestinians in Palestine? Why is there no demand from these same people for organizations to make a public statement against Israeli violence against Palestinians or American violence against Black people?

I believe I know why and I believe it is also at the core of Jewish silence around Palestinian suffering. It is racism. It is white supremacy. It is the privileging of some lives over others. And in this country, being pro-Israel has come to mean privileging the rights/humanity/dignity/health/suffering of one people (Jewish Israelis), whose biggest historical ally is the U.S. (a country founded on the genocide of one non-white people and the enslavement of another non-white people) over the rights/humanity/dignity/health/suffering of another people (Palestinians).

I cannot unsee this connection and it pains me to see Jewish people, my people, take our place in a dynamic that so closely mirrors the destructive, blind white supremacy that is so pervasive here in the U.S., an evil, undemocratic, un-Jewish ideology that is and will be used against us as soon as we do not abide by its rules about whose lives matter. The solution to Hamas’ virulent antisemitism and desire to destroy the state of Israel and its people is not Islamophobia and disregard for innocent Palestinian life, the relentless destruction and bombardment of Gaza, making access to water, electricity, food, safe shelter and medical care almost impossible for the Palestinian civilians who are not killed. There is no justification for Hamas’ actions, and there is also no justification for the Israeli government’s actions. To demand that the world condemn terrorism against Jews and never mention or condemn the terror so many innocent Palestinians are living in due to the Israeli government’s violence against them is to buy into the belief that some lives have greater value than others.