When violence erupts in Israel-Palestine, talking in public about Palestinian suffering is often met automatically with an assertion of Israeli suffering — as if one somehow cancels out, or even justifies, the other. It feels like compassion has become a scarce commodity. How do we grieve publicly without negating the experience of the “other side"?
This episode is not an expert interview, it's a conversation between two friends: one American, one Israeli. Unsettled producers Ilana Levinson and Asaf Calderon discuss empathy and anger, power, trauma, and responsibility.
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
“Want to help Israelis? Become an anti-Zionist” (Asaf Calderon, +972 Magazine, 5/19/21)
“What it’s like to have a Jewish terrorist in the family” (Asaf Calderon, Haaretz, 5/3/17)
Spotify playlist: Unsettled essentials, May 2021
TRANSCRIPT
ILANA LEVINSON: Watching the violence unfold in Israel-Palestine from afar brings up a lot of emotions. And we all respond differently to them. For me, I make this podcast you’re listening to. But I also argue with people in Facebook comments. Might not be healthy, but it’s what I do.
As I go back and forth with people who feel differently than I do, I’ve noticed a common thread in these debates. Bringing up Palestinian suffering, or fears, or pain is automatically met with an assertion of Israeli pain. As though what Israelis are going through right now somehow cancels out, or maybe even justifies what’s happening to Palestinians.
It’s almost like compassion has become a commodity, and a scarce one at that. How do we grieve publicly without negating the experience of the “other side.”
I’m Ilana Levinson and you’re listening to Unsettled.
I've been talking about what's been happening over the past week a lot with my fellow Unsettled producer Asaf Calderon. And in these conversations, we've also started reflecting on how Asaf relates to his upbringing in Israel. For those who don't know us, I'm an American Jew, raised outside of Philadelphia. Asaf is an Israeli Jewish activist and social worker, who moved to the United States in 2016. What you're about to hear isn't an expert interview, it's a conversation between two friends.
ILANA: Asaf, what's it like to be an Israeli person in America right now?
ASAF CALDERON: It's it's it's a. it's really weird, it's really strange and I am, I mean, you know, it's been it's been almost a week of this already, I think right. And at the beginning when it just started, I was sort of going, I was going crazy. I was surprised by how crazy I was feeling. I used to live in Tel Aviv and I have been through two of these like missile attacks on Tel Aviv. And it was like 2012, 2014 and when I was there, it just sort of like I mean, you don't accept it. I didn't accept it. I protested against it. But I also the just the sheer volume of the absurd, of the insanity didn't get to me emotionally as much as it is now like. it sheds it sheds a whole new light on my entire life before.
ASAF: I'm discovering new things about myself and about my relationship to to Israel, because when when you're there you just like you have to disassociate and now I don't have to do that. So I get to feel the entire range of my emotions. And, I’ve never lived outside of Israel before I came here in 2016, and so it was the only home that I knew was Israel and more specifically, it was Tel Aviv. And I sort of felt like it was my safe zone. And now I look back at it and I'm like, it was so crazy that I thought that. I was talking about it with my therapist and the thing that without even thinking about it came out of my mouth. Was that like I feel like I have escaped hell. That I am now only starting to realize just how much it was hell.
ILANA: So can you talk about what a typical day looks like when Israel and Hamas are in the midst of this kind of fighting.
ASAF: So, I mean, first of all, I would say that my experience was so mild, like compared to obviously compared to people in Gaza, but also compared to Israelis that are living like close by to Gaza. You sort of go about your day and then there is these alarms that go off and can get you at work, can get you at home. And you go to the stairwell because that's that's just like the instructions that you have to get as far away from external walls and windows, because that's the thing about these Hamas missiles. But they're basically all they're such weak missiles that if they hit your wall, they most likely they're going to like, you know, they might break your wall, they might go through that wall, but probably not much further than that. They are definitely not going to take down your your building. So if you're in the stairwell. You're likely going to be safe or at least safer. And like newer buildings in Israel, all new buildings, the apartments have a bomb shelter, basically like one of your rooms in the apartment. Usually it’s like a storage room or it can even be like a bigger room, like one of the children's rooms or something like that, is a bomb shelter. So it's got these like the walls are like fortified with steel or whatever. And the the window is this, like, hatch thing. I used to live in a bomb shelter for a while. I wanted to pay less rent and I lived with other people and it was like, I'm just going to live in a bomb shelter and and you don't think about it. It's just life. The buildings have bomb shelters. And the word that we use for basement, like there's a Hebrew word for basement, the Hebrew word for basement is martef, but many people will just say miklat which means shelter because it's obvious that you use your basement as a bomb shelter. And. The odds of anything hitting you are extremely, extremely low, so you it's it's almost ritualized you sort of like go to the stairwell, and you meet your neighbors there, and it just is sort of like this like surreal experience, and then you hear a boom. And then you just go back to whatever it is you were doing and. And that's just this like sort of like a surreal ceremony of it. Then. All the all the while, you know the IDF is heavily bombing Gaza and people are dying and and also in other parts of Israel so like by Gaza, like Sderot. These other towns that are close to Gaza, the danger is much more real. They have just so many missiles that they have to be into the bomb shelters all day long and. Um. And Israelis die, usually Israelis die, but people dying and the news sort of talks about them each as a person and they tell you something about them. Not just how old they were and what their name is. Sometimes the news say how many Palestinians were killed. It's not unusual to sort of Google it. It's just it's like endless sort of list of names of children and women and men and. They have no faces, you don't know until you don't know anything about them, just know that they are dying. Um, and. And then it ends and you’re like. Why does it end now? Like, why didn't we end it yesterday? Yeah, it’s. That's what it is.
ILANA: So you and I have been talking a lot and struggling together with this concept of politicized pain. Yeah. Which is a concept that I can't stop thinking about. Yeah. And I and I can't stop thinking about it because. I grew up with this conversation and this narrative about how how difficult it is to be an Israeli because of the reality that you're you're describing and the response. The conclusion of of. These stories about how horrifying it is to have to have your basement be a bomb shelter. The conclusion is always aren't Palestinian people awful? And it's terrible that we have to kill them, but we have to kill them and and and they have to die for us to be safe. And so now what I'm noticing is that whenever. People talk about Israeli pain, my association is unfortunately with demonizing Palestinians and with justifying Palestinian pain, and I I don't I don't want that to be my association with Israeli pain. I want my association with Israeli pain to only be compassion. And I I want to know how to maintain my humanity through all of this.
ASAF: Right. I mean, yeah, I mean. The pain is very real. Like the pain is so real. And I'm even sometimes struggling with, like, sort of comparing the pain, because I sort of go back and forth honestly, like I'm like, well, the Palestinians like they suffer so much more, which is definitely true, it's true. Right like. We sit in bomb shelters and we send our kids to the army and we, you know, like like we fucking we suffer. And it's it's no way to live. And it's insane. But we don't face the same existential horror that Palestinians are experiencing, especially in Gaza, but not only. We don't face the same, like helplessness that Palestinians are experiencing when they just like they don't have control over their own lives in a way that is unfathomable to us. And, you know, and like the endless humiliations of the occupation, like we don't we don't we don't even know like we don't go through that at all. But but we suffer. And. And the thing about pain, the thing about suffering is that it's unquantifiable, like you can't quantify it, you can't count it. t's incomparable, it's incomparable like Palestinian pain and Israeli pain are incomparable because the the power difference is just so great. So. You know, all of that is to say, like, it makes it really hard to talk about Israeli pain because it's sort of incomparable to Palestinian pain, and you want to center Palestinian pain because it's so important. I mean, it's it's so important, I think, to center Palestinian pain because, like. It's just it's ignored, it's ignored in Israel and it's ignored in the United States, like nobody's talking about it. And like you just sometimes you get these, like, numbers, but you don't get the stories and you don't get the faces and you don't get to actually experience and empathize with people's actual pain. And that's what it means to be colonized, to be, to be, to be occupied is you’re dehumanized. And so your pain is also dehumanized. It’s so important to talk about Palestinian pain. Then how do we talk about Israeli pain? how do we talk about Israeli pain without taking space from Palestinian pain? That's that's that's one difficulty. And the other difficulty is how do we talk about Israeli pain without playing into the the hasbara of the Israeli regime? How do we talk about the Israeli pain without it serving the regime?
ILANA: Right. Because, you know, you and I are people with extensive experience with therapy. And to me, when I hear people talk about comparing pain, my first instinct is like, that's not useful. It's not useful to talk about, it's not useful to talk about comparing two people's experiences of pain. The only way to address pain is compassion and to give space to it. And yet. The pain of both Palestinians and Israelis is used as a tool, and it's and it's it's very public, this pain is extremely public in a way that if you if you. If you show compassion publicly. Then you're speaking politically.
ASAF: Right, and I mean. I mean, I don't know about you, but like for me at least, like it's so hard to even access these these feelings of compassion, or at least it was hard for for a very long time. I think part of why it's so hard for me to to access these feelings of compassion is that it's just like being in Israel, during these escalations, during these like bombings of Gaza is is terrible for another reason, which is that. So many people are so full of hate. I mean, I just don't have another way to put it. It's like they're so full of hate and so many people support these these bombings out of just like pure like revenge and sometimes even just like pure like genocidal, like ideology. Some people want to make them suffer because they deserve it. Some people just want to kill all of them. Some people would say that, like, that's the only way that they understand. There's just so much of this violence. It's not just in the regime, it's in people's hearts. And I'm not saying everyone is like that, but it's so prominent.
ILANA: Yeah, and I think, you know. Those kinds of people who are who are. The people you're talking about who are genocidal are also talking about pain. You know, they're they're only talking about Israeli pain, but they're no less correct. That that's bad and.
ASAF: Their pain is also real, the pain is also real, but it's but it's so hard for me to feel empathy for them. And and I'm not even saying that like all Israelis are like that. I'm not trying to demonize Israelis, but it's like even the Israelis who are not genocidal, generally support these bombings. So I think, the bottom line is like Israelis as a people, we don't just support the regime, we are. We are we are holding the regime. We are the regime. I mean, I think that, like one thing that I've been really struggling in order to in order to feel this empathy this past week, I have done this sort of like the sort of like logical step of separating us Israelis from the regime being like there is Israel. And then there are the Israelis. And Israel is screwing us over like the Israeli regime, the the Israeli state is like fucking over the Israeli people, and that is true. I still think that's true. But I think one thing that I have moved from is trying to say that is trying to to see these things as separate as in like. We are not the regime's pawns. I mean, that would be easier. It would be easier to imagine us as the regime’s pawns.
ASAF: When I'm saying that the regime is screwing us over, what I'm actually saying is that we are screwing ourselves over, It's it's it's sort of hard for me to, I guess, put into words like I think how much like being Israeli is associated with the state of Israel. Like, I think one thing that is so central to to being Israeli above all else. Is serving in the military and. When I was growing up and I was a teenager then, I was sort of considering if I should go serve in the military or not, there was this campaign that was saying a true Israeli doesn't dodge the draft. And so I. I internalized that and I sort of like came to the conclusion that, like, I'm not really a true Israeli if I'm not serving in the military and I didn't serve in the military, I actually chose not to serve in the military. And I really sort of internalized that. And. In a way, I don't think that I don't think it's wrong, like I think being Israeli the way that Israel is now, it means being a soldier, even if you're not literally a soldier like you have this like duty to defend Israel, even if it's like if it means like defending it, like on Twitter.
ILANA: But I mean, the way that we got to this place, we're talking about what a true Israeli means is, is, is because we're talking about how to sort of separate. Defending an Israeli person's right to live and to live without having to have your basement be a bomb shelter without having to run from rockets. Separating that from defending Israel's right to do whatever it wants. And so what does what does that say? What is your analysis about about who is a true Israeli say about about that system.
ASAF: I think all of that is to say that, like, it's really hard for me to feel that compassion when I know that, like Israelis are choosing to sort of like uphold this regime, but I think we need to let ourselves feel that compassion, feel that pain. Knowing that. Like. Knowing that. Knowing that. It's. I don't know, like…
ILANA: Well, it seems to me that it's the dichotomy that allows for the public conversation about pain to be such that if you show compassion or one quote unquote side, Israelis or Palestinians, then you are defending the the choices of of that side’s military.
ASAF: Right, absolutely, I mean, I think that, like, we we really need to stop doing that and we need to stop buying that. I think it's not only important that we let ourselves feel this compassion because it's real, I think it's also important to politicize it. I do think that it makes sense to politicize pain. I think it's important to politicize pain because it's political. It's the pain is a result of political choices made by the Israeli regime and. But and so by extension, by the Israeli people, it's choices that we make that are the that causes this pain. And that doesn't mean to I'm not saying that in order to sort of like because it kind of sounds like, you know, like I have no compassion because it's like, well, you know, it's it's sort of like blaming us for like.
ILANA: This is this is where I'm most challenged because because it honestly does remind me a little bit of the of the argument that people will make that, oh, it's so sad that that Palestinians are dying, but they're dying at the hands of their own government.
ASAF: Right. But, yeah, I mean, you know, it's it is kind of actually very similar. But I think, like, the way that I approach it is not to blame us. It’s like. We are making shitty choices. And we're making shitty choices because we’re hurt. Because we've been hurt, because we've been hurt even before we got there like we are. The. Like, we we carry pain form from the pogroms and we carry pain from the Holocaust and. And so we make shitty choices like we we make choices based on like knee jerk reactions to to trauma and we are retraumatizing and retraumatizing ourselves constantly. And it's this like cycle. And I'm not saying that to take away our responsibility for these choices because they are choices. Of course we're responsible but the fact that we're responsible. It doesn't mean that, like I, I have no compassion for us. And I think part of why I'm really trying to speak in the ‘us’ here, by the way, and not in the them, like I'm the grandson of Holocaust survivors and I am like, I don't know, like I have also been through this like like missile attacks and like, I'm fucking traumatized and and like. It's not I'm not still probably making shitty choices because of that, you know, and. So it's not like it's not so much being like. You made bad choices, and so you deserve it, it's you made bad choices, you don't deserve it because no one deserves this. And how are we helping you stop making bad choices or how are we making ourselves stop making bad choices?
ILANA: Right, and this is I mean, it's interesting to to hear you navigate who you're speaking to.
ASAF: Yeah.
ILANA: Because I feel like I'm navigating that all the time, I and and the truth is that you and I have different orientations.
ASAF: Yeah
ILANA: I mean, you have a different orientation then than an Israeli person who was in the army even. I mean, we all have have different different affiliations and and experiences. But the truth is that I'm not Israeli at all. Right. I'm I'm, I'm just not. And I honestly, when people say to me, you have no idea what it's like, you don't live here.
ASAF: Yeah, I mean, like, thank God you don't. But I mean, I think something that's really important is like always has to be said, is that you don't need to know what it's like in order to know what's right. There is it's another it's another related manipulation to be like you don't experience this and therefore you don't know what's going on. But I mean, you know what's going on. You see the bombs falling. You know what's going on. In many ways, because I’m Israeli, I think it's harder for me to feel this empathy than it is to some of my American Jewish friends. Because you guys you have been raised to. I mean, it's so weird because you've been raised to love us. You were raised to to adore us, you were raised to care about us and like. And so and so I think it comes it's probably comes so so natural to so many American Jews to feel compassion towards Israelis. And and what I'm feeling is I'm feeling like I'm I'm looking at these people that I feel like have rejected me because I didn't serve in the army and because, like, I I don't know, like I hold, like, beliefs that like they, you know, like most people don't accept. And there was a long time in my life like, you know, years, I think when when I was like, well fuck all these people. And that's not I mean, I'm not proud of that. Like it was. It was immature and it was it was bad and it was without any empathy, but that’s, I mean, I was like that. And I don't want to be like this anymore, and I'm trying to, like, fight it.
ILANA: So, I mean, I don't think we're here to fix this problem, but, just in case we might. I mean, what what what what does it look like? I mean, I. So I have this friend who I look up to and I admire and he recently said to me. Listen it. It just feels like there's a lack of compassion for Israeli people who are going through what we're going through.
ASAF: Yeah
ILANA: And. That's. I don't. I don't want to have that impact on people, so what how how how do I get my humanity back? Like, how do I how do I stop? How do I how do I get out of the cycle? Where. My. My experience of. Distributing compassion is associated with a political affiliation.
ASAF: I think it starts. I think, at least for me, I think it starts with like understanding that you can have compassion towards someone that is doing something really bad. Like you can, you can. You can have compassion to someone and criticize them. You can have compassion to someone and be mad at them also at the same time.
ILANA: But publicly? I mean, that's.
ASAF: Yeah.
ILANA: This conversation is happening in the public sphere.
ASAF: Yeah. We need to find a way. To to be public about it. We need to find a way to really put it out there that Every drop of Israeli blood that spilled is preventable and that it is the responsibility of, that it's our responsibility as Israelis to prevent it. And it doesn't mean that it's not painful, on the contrary. Like, it's sort of like the more I think about it, like the more I feel that just it being so preventable, making it even more painful, but it just so mixed with, like anger that it's really hard to get to. But I think we must like I think we must like we must get to the point where we can. We can be angry at someone and still feel compassionate about them, and one thing that I think is that like I mean, I'm just thinking about like how how so many people care about Israelis. And I think. I think it's a problem for you if you care so much about Israelis and you don't care about Palestinians, I think you should start caring about Palestinians. But I don't think you should stop caring about Israelis. I think I think it's great that you care about Israelis. If you care about us so much, help us understand that we are harming ourselves.
ASAF: We're killing ourselves. We're just killing ourselves. Grieve that, like grieve that with me, you know, like like grieve with me the. The pain of knowing that we are our own worst enemy. And and how tragic it is. And then fight it. That's it.
ILANA: Asaf recently published a piece in +972 Magazine about Israel’s exploitation of Jewish pain to justify violence toward Palestinians. It’s called “Want to help Israelis? Become an anti-Zionist.” You can read it at 972mag.com
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, and me, Max Freedman and me, Ilana Levinson. Our theme music is by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions.
If you’re looking for more context for what’s happening in Israel-Palestine, check out our new Spotify playlist to help make sense of this moment. We’ve taken a few episodes from our back catalog that directly speak to some of what’s happening right now. You can find a link to that playlist in the show notes, and I hope you’ll share with friends and family members who are looking for more information and context and storytelling as the violence continues to escalate.
If you liked this episode of Unsettled, leave us a rating or review on Apple podcasts. And be sure to subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts.