A deadly psychological divide is growing between Israelis and Palestinians

Likewise, Palestinian insight into the devouring specters of anti-Semitic persecution awakened among Jews by the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack seems negligible. Mutual empathy is very difficult to find.

“Each side is begging for five-star victim status,” said Mohammad Darawshe, strategy director at the Givat Haviva Center for Shared Society in Jerusalem, which promotes Jewish-Arab dialogue. “When you’re stuck in victimhood, you see everyone else as victimized and dehumanizing.”

The result is a psychological divide so deep that Palestinians as individuals are invisible to Israeli Jews, and vice versa. There are exceptions, of course: some Israelis and Palestinians have dedicated themselves to bridging that divide. But overall, the two sides’ narratives diverge, burying any perception of shared humanity.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli war, known to Israelis as the War of Independence, is the Nakba, or catastrophe, for Palestinians. Nakba rivals the Holocaust because both sides invoke ‘genocide’.

The ruthless weaponization of history goes all the way back to Biblical times and the divergent fates of Abraham’s estranged sons – Isaac, the patriarch of the Israelites, and Ishmael, a prophet of Islam.

“On October 7, Hamas trampled every nerve in the Israeli psyche,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “Hate, fear and anxiety are at their most extreme right now. But in the end there are two peoples who covet the same land, and you have to try to see two sides of the story.”

The demonization knows no bounds. Since last month’s Hamas attack, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has spoken of the fight against “human animals.” Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, has described Israel as “neo-Nazis backed by colonial forces.” Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, has in turn called Hamas ‘the new Nazis’.

A Palestinian-Israeli MP, Ofer Cassif, has alluded to “pogroms” against Palestinians to describe the brutal Israeli bombardment of Gaza, a word whose specific historical meaning is the slaughter of Jews and a word that many Israelis have used to describe the murder by describing Hamas. of about 1,200 people last month, according to Israeli authorities.