Years ago, I was traveling in Europe with a friend, and we decided to see a film. I don’t remember the film’s name or why we chose to spend our afternoon watching it, but I do remember the woman who sat next to us in the theater.
Her name was Stephanie, my name, so I felt an instant connection with her. She had reddish curls and was older than us, probably in her early thirties. She said she was from Israel.
She was eager to talk about her life in Israel. Her daughter rode a bus to school, and Stephanie feared for the child’s safety.
Stephanie knew people who had been killed in suicide bombings. She spoke of horrific acts of violence as though they were a part of daily life. The evil side of life.
We listened to her with concern and empathy. We asked what she thought of the people who carried out these attacks, the people she called Palestinians.
“They are monsters,” she told us, the same conviction in her voice as I have when saying that ice is cold, that a stove is hot. “They are evil. They should be slaughtered.”
It was a bit shocking, to be having a lovely conversation with a kind mother who shared my name, and then for her to start advocating for genocide. Hello, What’s your name, Where are you from, Is there any group of people you would like to massacre?
I am familiar with casual and even outright racism: I am an American. I have heard a leader of my own country call immigrant families “animals,” a rallying cry to dehumanize human beings, the first step on any journey toward harming other people.
In a way, I find it almost comforting that hurting other people is so anathema to humans that we have to twist our minds with lies in order to carry it out. We have to convince ourselves that people are not people. What is not comforting is realizing how easily our minds are warped.
“They are monsters.” That is what you have to believe to want to harm other people. You have to stop seeing them as humans, stop identifying with them. They are not like you.
They do not have love for their children coursing through their veins, the way that you do. They do not also fear for their daughter when she climbs on the bus to go to school. They have not also known grief and terror so overwhelming that they have been consumed by it. They do not also know what it is to suffer so much that they begin to hate.
No, the other side, they are only monsters.
What little, indirect knowledge that I have of the seemingly eternal conflict in and around Israel, is that it is not a one-sided affair. I knew that much that day, talking to Stephanie. I felt compassion for her and for how she suffered. But I also felt fear at the way she spoke so casually about genocide.
When I see the conflict today in Gaza, I think about Stephanie. About her daughter, who is perhaps the right age to fight in this war or even have a child of her own. About what motivates the daughter, what she was taught to believe.
Stephanie believed that monsters were trying to annihilate her and her people. That they were full of the same hatred for Jews that led to the Holocaust. Stephanie said that their battle was for Jewish survival.
And I don’t know that she was wrong. I don’t know what is in the hearts of the people that attack Israelis. I can’t and won’t defend them.
But what I do know is that people who have not healed from trauma will repeat the terrible things that were done to them. Hurt people who don’t heal will seek revenge; they will hurt others. Cycles of violence, like cycles of generational trauma, are only resolved through healing. Not by more violence.
Once in an online grad class, I met a woman who worked in a park in Israel. Her park had many migratory birds, and she and I spoke of how these birds crossed borders, traversed areas of conflict.
In fact, Israel is the only land bridge connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. Hundreds of millions of migratory birds pass through the tiny nation each year. It is a bottleneck for winged life.
Migratory birds have flown over Israel for much longer than it has been a region of ancient conflict. They will pass back and forth across it now, even while war rages.
This Israeli park employee promoted peace using her birds. She spoke of trying to work with other parks along the bird’s path, parks in neighboring Muslim nations. She spoke of using the birds to teach her park’s patrons about unity across the region.
She said she did not see the border in the same way as some in Israel; she thought of it as a boundary, not a wall. Something porous that could allow good things to come and go.
I’m not sure how many people in Israel are like Stephanie and how many are like this park caretaker. I’m not sure who is right and who is wrong. But I remember how viscerally I reacted to both of them–the message of one feeling so wrong and the other feeling so right.
I remember standing in the Texas desert, where I lived at the time I took that grad class, and staring at the US/Mexican border. I remember contemplating my interactions with our border and with the kinds of people that some of my nation’s leaders called animals.
I remember thinking that some things are universal; they wing their way over all borders. Fear, hope, birds. And that if I had to take one of these borderless things into my heart, it would be a message of hope from one of the most violent places on earth.