My Despair and Inspiration re. Us vs. Them Destructiveness by Dinah Bachrach

Last December, as I was reeling from the October 7^th massacre of Israelis followed by the genocide unfolding in Gaza, I had the good fortune to attend a zoom workshop held at a Berkeley California synagogue hosting an Israeli Rabbi and a Palestinian activist from the West Bank called Roots. Their talk was titled: Two Truths in One Heart: Two Peoples in One Land.

In their words:

Roots/Shorashim/Judur has created and operates for 7 years the only joint Israeli-Palestinian community center in the entire West Bank. This safe, holy space hosts social, religious, and educational activities, bringing together hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis who begin to realize that there are two truths, two stories – not one – in this land, and the only way forward is to cherish both.

They spoke honestly about how the bonds had formed in their community between Israelis and Palestinians. I was shocked to learn how completely separately Israelis and Palestinians live in the West Bank: separate roads, schools, hospitals etc. and how they never encounter each other except through check-points, violence, arrests, property and home destruction and movement restriction as the Israeli military and settlers occupy and oppress Palestinians. As a result, fear and stereotypes about the other persist. And I was moved and inspired to hear how the Roots community had remarkable inroads between the two peoples in connecting, learning and recognizing each other’s humanity.

But they also spoke about how they were seriously challenged by October 7^th.   Israelis desperately needed to hear Palestinian’s horror and empathy, but were furious when that was genuinely offered with the addition of phrases like ‘this attack comes out of a context’ (75 years of Nakba, occupation, apartheid).  Both people felt betrayed by the other.

It’s a year later and, in their updates, I read how the Roots/Shorashim/Judur group is persevering and making progress, as their leadership grapples with how both peoples are trauma-driven and feel victimized.

I have followed other peace groups in Israel and touring here (Combatants for Peace,

The Parents Circle Family Forum, the Refuser Solidarity Network, Non-violence International, Salt of the Earth, Rabbis for a Ceasefire).  Because of their work, I am deeply moved and renewed in my belief and hope that healing and repair can happen when people truly listen and share their very different life experiences and learn truths of each other’s history.

Recently, I watched Jon Stewart interview Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book The Message. Ta-Nehisi experienced first-hand the experience of Palestinians in the West Bank and called it, apartheid.  It was so familiar to him because of his own experience, and that of Blacks for centuries in the US, who are treated as inferior and criminal.  He also felt the enormous pain when he was with Israelis where the massacre took place.  Jon Stewart spoke of overcoming his Jewish upbringing that conditioned him toward idealizing Israel and Zionism and how long he has known and felt the pain and injustice of Palestinians. It was remarkable to see them each speak vulnerably about the deep sorrow they carry.

Coates and Stewart acknowledged the generational traumas and victim identities that both Israelis and Palestinians carry, though most Israelis and many diaspora Jews can’t see beyond their trauma-narrative to recognize the truth that the Zionist Israeli government has become perpetrators of occupation apartheid, racism and genocide.

And then there are Jewish Voices for Peace, and Not in My Name etc. with their powerful civil disobedience and the many students, professors, intellectuals risking being expelled, cancelled and fired.

As a couples’ therapist, I work with that intimate challenge in 1-to-1 relationships: people who have been together for decades and finally hear and understand something from their partner they never knew, that brings new insight and softens their heart.  I intend to create a safe space wherein both people feel their inherent goodness is respected, despite harmful behavior, and to teach them to slow down, regulate their nervous systems so they can listen more openly and take risks to express themselves more vulnerably.  It is hard work over time and not always successful but it is so meaningful when it is.

As a white privileged American, I have so much unlearning to do, so much misinformation and mythologies to unpack from the powerful dominant colonizing mindset I was accultured in. Colonizing, taking over land and people, is about power, greed and racism: othering a group of people as inferior. Isabel Wilkerson’s powerful book Caste opened my eyes to all the ways that caste systems operate with their brutal and insidious power in India, Nazi Germany and the US.

Only in the last decade have I learned much true history of the genocide and displacement and continued attempts of cultural erasure of Native peoples, and the true history of slavery, Jim Crow and continued mass incarceration of African-Americans, the histories of the Japanese-American internment camps and the oppression of Latino Americans. And now we are facing a new level of purposeful misinformation by Trump and the far-right media aided by foreign countries seeding social media to affect the election.

Us vs Them…how do we break out of it? 

Who can we trust?  Which truths are truly True?  There are certainly many different perspectives that come from differing life experiences. And yet, we all have to get quiet enough, still enough, to listen to our heart’s wisdom as well as our intellect, and to use our intellect to hold bigger contexts.  When we approach all human beings, and the more-than-human beings of Mother Earth, with humble respect for our enormous inter-dependency,

we have a chance at feeling the sense of belonging, of healing from so much injustice that we all long for.

I have been drawn this year to the work of Loretta J. Ross, an African American activist over five decades.  Her work tracking hate groups and showing up for people who left hate groups taught her that it’s hard to hate people when you get to know them. She leads workshops and classes in Calling-In – first doing your internal work, then holding people causing harm accountable with love. This involves becoming informed rather than being driven by your trauma.  It involves knowing how to be intentional, moral and strategic in building connections with others, and bringing them into the Human Rights Movement.

Valarie Kaur, a Sikh -American activist continues to inspire me with her Revolutionary Love Project, calling us all in with her Moral Compass, how to breathe and push to heal ourselves, how to wonder, grieve and fight to See No Stranger (her book title) in others, and how to rage, listen and reimagine in order to tend the wounds of your opponents.

All of these people and so many more I keep encountering are praying the same prayer, speaking the same Truth, that ultimately we have one heart, one land, one world that we must love and care for. We won’t take sides as Us vs. Them as ultimately they are us.   There, alongside my deep despair, grief and outrage, lies my hope, my inspiration.