The Prerequisite for Atrocity
On who we can love and the cost of belonging
I grew up in a system where who I was allowed to love was predetermined, and the only question that mattered was whether they were Jewish.
I was taught that love outside of the tribe was not a personal choice, that relationship with a non-Jew was a silent Holocaust, that our souls were fundamentally different in ways that could never be bridged. The framing varied, whether religious, cultural, or traditional, but the hierarchy was ethnicity. What determined worth was category and not character.
I internalized through stories and rules that other people were lesser by nature, that theft, murder, and immorality were in their essence, that closeness itself was dangerous. None of this required religious conviction to hold. They were simply not fully human in the way we were.
I learned that loving the wrong person would mean rejection, excommunication, and disinheritance. To survive that threat, I needed to close off something inside, filtering which people I could truly see and what I could feel, not from hatred but from self-protection.
These beliefs, left unexamined, shaped how I showed up. I protected belonging over truth, and what I repressed sought outlet where it wouldn’t threaten my belonging. I found that outlet with people already othered, people I could use and dominate. I created fake personas to act on what I couldn’t own as myself, and I caused harm I am still accountable for.
We cannot truly love anyone if that love is conditional on the exclusion of others.
Eventually I faced my behaviors and traced the patterns back. I lost what I had feared losing since childhood, and I survived. The performance I thought would protect my belonging was the thing that made real connection impossible. Love based on truth and humanity became possible.
When I speak about the humanity of Palestinians, the assumed motive is often sexualized and fetishized. When the conditioning of othering is complete, recognizing humanity across the boundary is incomprehensible. The degrading accusations do not describe my experience. They expose the conditioning itself.
When these same beliefs meet power, they manifest as control, domination, degradation. Sexual humiliation of victims and prisoners is documented by perpetrators, shared openly, defended by officials, glorified publicly. Where there is no recognition of humanity, there is no shame.
No one can be argued into seeing what the mechanism of self-protection blocks. The filter exists to survive the fear of exclusion, and it only falls when that fear is faced and survived. What follows is a process of dismantling the beliefs that made the other less than human, the projection that placed our own capacity for harm onto them, and the fragmentation that kept us from ourselves.
What remains in the aftermath is love without performance, connection without hiding, humanity beyond category.
רחמים
رحمة
I find the sexual torture of Palestinians particularly abhorrent. It shows the absolute level of degradation the Israeli soul has reached.
You are a lovely and inspiring voice. My own son is near your age…his father is a zionist. We divorced when my son was one and his father went on to marry a woman who had served in the IDF. They told him Muslims would kill him, that he was more Jewish than anything else (I am not Jewish), and that he would feel at home in Israel. He hated it because he heard the kind of talk that terrified him as a child. Then he grew up and somehow became terrified his father would be murdered by a Palestinian. On October 20, 2023, I received the last message I’ve had from my son in going on three years. He saw my posts about Gazans having the right to rise up and accused me of antisemitism. Ironic, given that his father did not practice Judaism even as I tried my best to observe Jewish holidays so our son would know something of his ancestry. It is deeply painful to me that my only child is enraged at my activism. Reading your words gives me hope.