To the Editor:
Gabor Maté is a Jewish-Canadian physician, Holocaust survivor and trauma specialist. His grandparents were killed at Auschwitz.
In an interview, Maté talked about Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a co-founder of Hamas who utilized suicide bombers. As a young boy, Rantisi witnessed Israeli soldiers kill his uncle as a part of the Khan Yunis massacre in Gaza in 1956.
Maté, who condemns October 7 and the killing of civilians, explains, “One of the impacts of trauma is it can close your heart, and when your heart’s closed you don’t see the humanity of the other.”
Dr. Maté asserts that this has also happened in Israel. He cites Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans gleefully chanting, “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.”
Maté contends, “If their hearts can be so embittered and closed and shut, can we understand how some of the Palestinians can respond in the same way?”
Lily Greenberg Call is a Jewish-American who resigned from her position in the Biden Administration because of its support for the war in Gaza. She emphasizes that Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom are intertwined, and that any system that oppresses another people is “inherently unsafe.”
A similar sentiment is expressed by Peter Beinart, an Editor-at-Large at Jewish Currents. According to Beinart:
“It terrifies me to think about what Israel is doing now that will reverberate for the rest of my life…You cannot inflict terrible, terrible suffering on another people and think that you will be permanently insulated from that suffering.”
The focus by Israel and the United States on a militarized approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not interrupt the cycle of trauma and violence.
As President Jimmy Carter asserted in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, “We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
While the journey is a very long one, our best hope is through advocacy for Palestinian human rights and for legal equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
Terry Hansen
Milwaukee
