I work for a company with people who live all around the world, including Israel and Palestine.

Just as not all Americans are bad people who love guns and think a “god” gave them this land to take as they see fit, not all Israelis feel that way either, and not all Palestinians hate Israelis. The Israeli military is not all Israelis, despite the fact that everyone is forced to serve. Zionists are not all Israelis. Hamas is not all Palestinians. The news never tells us everything.

I did not choose to be born in a place my ancestors stole, but I am here, and if you know anything about me, you know that I really give a shit about that. A lot of Israelis feel the same way about where they were born, too. They deeply love and respect the land where they live and are intimately connected to it, and they also understand that they share it with other people (obviously this is the abbreviated version, and there are different understandings about how and why everyone is there). Regardless, like many Americans, they don’t have or desire anywhere else to “go,” either, so instead, they work for peace and mutual respect and the end of an occupation mentality. And there are many Palestinians who do the same. They work from opposite ends of experience, but they meet in the middle and try to understand it all.

Many years ago, I traveled there, and I stayed in Jerusalem for a while, an epicenter of Abrahamic religious tension – the three biggest patriarchal religions all claiming to own rights to some ancient bricks, requiring that anyone desiring of the religious experience of touching them walk through metal detectors first.

Just like we have here in the US, there are a certain type of people who feed into this tension, and who believe in the might of military and weaponry to oversee it. It’s not everyone, though. Later during those travels, I stayed with an Israeli family. During a religious observance when all the electricity was shut off throughout the town, I snuck out with the family’s teenagers so they could go meet their Palestinian friends and hang out under the cover of darkness. And they were teenagers, smoking cigarettes, laughing, making eyes at each other, speaking each other’s languages and enjoying the excitement of illicit activity.

I can’t see another “free Palestine” post today. Stop it. I believe in the freedom of Palestine, too. I don’t, at all, approve of these settler rampages that destroy Palestinian homes, olive groves and businesses, believing in their god-given redneck right to steal the land. I do not approve of the Israeli army killing people (especially backed with weaponry provided by the United States). And I do not approve of Hamas taking people hostage, raping or killing people, either. A land of generationally traumatized people is at war with itself, breeding atrocities. There is no end to this. No one wins.

If there is a god, and if that god is why we are, in all of these patriarchal religions, the sole species blessed with the gift of reason, we are not at all serving this god by acting like this. “They” are every bit as much of us as we are “them.” We are all human, and we are the worst kind of animal; we have been caged by our own rage and fear and are now terrified, without trust, faith, or the ability to truly use the gifts this god as purportedly bestowed upon us.

Pray for Palestine. Pray for Israel. Pray for humanity. Or in lieu of all that, just be a good human. Work for peace and the evolution of this species, because if we aren’t already there, we are on our way to hell.

*** Feature image by hosny salah from Pixabay