Expanding Our Empathetic Imaginations

A year after Oct. 7, hardened hearts and closed minds have gotten us nowhere.

Photo by Lucio Patone on Unsplash

Today is October 8th. Yesterday, October 7th, was the one-year anniversary of the horrific attack in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage, including children and the elderly. In the days that followed, Israel launched a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including scores of innocent women, men, and children. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the life of every single person in Gaza has been devastated by this war, which is now expanding into the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Gaza has become a land of motherless children, a place where nowhere is safe for long.

Demonstrators around the world marked the Oct. 7 anniversary with protests against the war, with protests to bring the hostages home, with memorials to the dead and missing. Much of this was beautiful; some of it was incredibly ugly.

In the year since Oct. 7, I’ve been bowled over in the best of ways by the sense of moral urgency on display by so many who show up to protest, including many of those who beg for a ceasefire, those who insist that Palestinian lives are as valuable as Israeli or American ones, and those who demand the hostages be brought home. Too often, vast human suffering simply goes largely ignored in the well-to-do West, especially if that suffering occurs in regions outsiders can write off as long-suffering: tragic to be sure, but also more of the same (just ask people in Sudan or the DRC). The suffering of Israelis on Oct. 7, and of Palestinians before and especially after, has remained front and center for the past year.

But: For what? That suffering has only grown, especially for Palestinians. And one of the darkest outcomes of Oct. 7, aside from the obvious — the absolutely astonishing loss of life and limb and safety and basic infrastructure and hope — has been the entrenchment into the worst and most base parts of our humanity. It’s been, for those whose lives are not under daily threat, the extinguishing of empathetic imaginations.