Too many Jews have a dangerous habit of apologizing for self-defense.
Someone needs to say it: The preservation of Palestinian comfort is not morally superior to the preservation of Jewish life.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
“When was the last time you were in Israel?” someone asked at a Jewish event the other day.
“Just before October 7th,” another answered.
“I was there more recently,” a third added.
“Oh wow, it must be so hard right now. I mean, just the whole situation — the wars with Iran and Gaza, and the suffering of the Palestinians.”
There it was: A conversation among Jews about Israel had lasted perhaps 30 seconds before someone felt compelled to mention “the Palestinians.”
Not the Israeli families still living with the consequences of October 7th. Not the displaced communities. Not the fallen and wounded IDF soldiers. Not the Israeli families who spent months and years waiting for their loved ones to return. Not the global explosion of antisemitism. Not the Jewish schools, synagogues, businesses, and community centers now operating behind massive layers of security.
“The Palestinians.”
This reflex has become so common among Jews that we barely notice it anymore. We cannot discuss Jewish suffering without immediately introducing someone else’s suffering to qualify it. We cannot defend Israel without first demonstrating that we feel terrible about what Israel’s enemies forced it to do. We cannot mourn our dead without rushing to assure the world that we are also mourning people on the other side.
Empathy is not the problem. The problem is what Jews have been trained to do with it.
Too many Jews do not merely feel compassion for Palestinians. They use Palestinian suffering to weaken their own moral confidence. They treat empathy as evidence that Israel must be wrong, that Jewish power must be dangerous, and that Jewish survival becomes morally suspicious the moment it carries a cost.
That is not empathy. It is moral self-disarmament.
Palestinians have suffered — sometimes at the doing of Israel, but mostly at the hands of their own governments and politicians. A serious person does not need to deny that.
War is horrific. Innocent people suffer. Children inherit conflicts they did not create. Families lose homes, security, and loved ones. None of this should be celebrated, dismissed, or spoken about casually.
But acknowledging suffering does not answer the most important questions.
Who created the conditions that produced it? Who chose war? Who has habitually rejected coexistence since the 1800s? Who embedded a military fortress within civilian society? Who decided that attacking Israel was worth the predictable consequences for Palestinian civilians? Who continues to treat Palestinian suffering not as a tragedy to be prevented, but as a weapon to be aimed at Israel?
Compassion tells us that suffering matters. It does not tell us who is responsible. Yet many Jews collapse those two questions into one.
They see a suffering Palestinian (which could very well be a doctored image, as has been proven many times) and conclude that Israel must have committed an injustice. They see a destroyed building in Gaza (which was likely tied to terrorist infrastructure) and conclude that Israel must have committed an injustice. They see a crying Palestinian woman (whose husband is likely on the payroll of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and conclude that Israel must have committed an injustice.
The suffering itself becomes the proof — and that standard is never applied to anyone else.
When Britain bombed Nazi Germany, the suffering of German civilians did not retroactively transform Britain into the aggressor. When the United States fought ISIS, civilian suffering did not erase the distinction between a democratic country and a genocidal terrorist organization. When Ukraine defends itself, no serious person argues that Ukrainian legitimacy depends on ensuring that absolutely no Russian civilian ever suffers.
Only Israelis (Jews, really) are expected to fight a war in which the enemy’s civilians remain entirely untouched — and if they cannot accomplish that impossible task, Jews are expected to apologize for Israel’s existence.
The most uncomfortable part of this conversation is also the most necessary: Jewish empathy for Palestinians is largely unreciprocated.
That does not mean no Palestinian has ever expressed compassion for an Israeli. It does not mean every Palestinian supports Hamas or jihad or terrorism. Palestinian society is not a single mind, but political affiliation is not the only measure of a society’s moral culture.
A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll conducted in 2024 found that two-thirds of respondents considered Hamas’ decision to launch the October 7th attack correct. More than 90 percent said they did not believe Hamas had committed atrocities against Israeli civilians. The pollster itself noted that approval of the attack did not necessarily mean approval of every act committed that day, but the broader moral asymmetry remains impossible to ignore.
The Palestinian public has been exposed to decades — not years, but decades — of institutions, media, political movements, religious figures, and education that portray Israeli suffering as deserved, fabricated, irrelevant, or strategically useful.
There has been no great Palestinian reckoning with October 7th; no mass movement demanding moral accountability for what was done to Israeli civilians; no widespread cultural revolt against the glorification of those who murder Jews; no Palestinian equivalent of the endless Jewish organizations, writers, rabbis, activists, and donors whose primary purpose appears to be publicly worrying about the other side.
Again, that does not make every Palestinian guilty, but it should force Jews to ask why we believe empathy must flow overwhelmingly in one direction.
Why is Jewish morality measured by our ability to feel Palestinian pain, while Palestinian morality is rarely measured by an ability to feel ours? Why must Israelis understand Palestinian rage, while Palestinians are not expected to understand Israeli fear? Why must Jews contextualize Palestinian violence, while Jewish self-defense is stripped of all context? Why is Palestinian hatred treated as the natural product of history, but Jewish anger treated as a moral defect?
Many Jews believe that feeling bad for Palestinians proves something admirable about them.
It proves they are not tribal. It proves they are “enlightened.” It proves they are different from those aggressive, nationalist, insufficiently remorseful Jews who embarrass them.
Sometimes the empathy is genuine. Sometimes it is performative. Often it is both.
But moral seriousness is not measured by how quickly you announce compassion for the people on the other side. It is measured by whether your compassion clarifies reality or obscures it.
A doctor who feels compassion for a disease but refuses to treat it is not compassionate. A parent who feels terrible about disciplining a destructive child and therefore permits the destruction to continue is not compassionate. A country that allows its enemies to attack because preventing them would cause those enemies hardship is not compassionate. It is negligent.
There is a difference between feeling bad that a war is necessary and feeling guilty for fighting it. The first is human, the second can become fatal.
The IDF, as a matter of formal governing doctrine, has long taken every reasonable measure to protect innocent life. It investigates wrongdoing. It punishes genuine abuses. It remains morally accountable not because the world demands perfection from Jews, but because Jewish power is largely governed by Jewish values.
But none of that requires Jews to pretend that the tragedy of Gaza began when Israel responded.
It began long ago when Palestinian leaders repeatedly chose the destruction of Israel over the construction of “Palestine.” It worsened when several Arab and Muslim governments chose to keep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alive and well for their own geopolitical gains, often at the expense of the Palestinians. It deepened when Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad converted Gaza into an Islamist launching ground for war. It became catastrophic when Hamas initiated October 7th knowing precisely what kind of war would follow.
Not every Palestinian made those decisions, and neither did every Israeli.
The cruelest truth is that Palestinian suffering is not merely an accidental consequence of the strategies deployed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and virtually every other mainstream Palestinian political entity past and present.
Palestinian suffering is central to their strategies. It is a feature, not a bug, as they say in the tech world.
Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily. It can, however, create conditions in which Israel must choose between protecting its citizens and preserving its international reputation. The game is old by now: Attack Israel, operate from within civilian areas, provoke an Israeli response, broadcast Palestinian suffering (both manufactured and real), and rely on the world to forget who initiated the war.
The more Israel tries to defend itself, the more images emerge. The more images emerge, the more international pressure grows. And the more pressure grows, the greater the possibility that Hamas survives to repeat the process.
Jewish guilt is therefore not merely an emotional response to the strategy. It is one of the strategy’s objectives.
Hamas does not need every Jew to become anti-Israel. It only needs enough Jews to become uncertain, to hesitate, to demand that Israel stop before our enemies are defeated, to treat the preservation of Palestinian comfort as morally superior to the preservation of Jewish life.
The Jewish community’s most compulsively empathetic voices often believe they are standing outside the conflict as neutral moral observers. They are not. When their empathy is used to constrain Israel while demanding nothing from Palestinian society, they are participating in the conflict — just not on the side they imagine.
The obsession with publicly grieving for Palestinians would be less grotesque if Jewish safety were secure, but it is not.
The Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025 — an average of 17 per day. Although that represented a decline from the extraordinary levels of 2024, it was still the third-highest annual total since the ADL began tracking incidents in 1979.
Jews have been threatened, assaulted, excluded, harassed, and blamed for a war thousands of miles away. Jewish institutions require security not because of abstract historical trauma, but because people still want to harm Jews. And still, when Jews gather, we feel the need to prove that we are concerned about Palestinians.
Imagine another minority behaving this way.
Imagine an Armenian event where, within moments of discussing Armenia’s security, someone interrupted to emphasize the suffering of Azerbaijanis. Imagine a Ukrainian gathering where the first response to a discussion of Russian aggression was concern that Russians were having a difficult time. Imagine women discussing violence against women and immediately reassuring everyone that they also feel terrible for the men who face consequences for committing it.
People would recognize the pathology instantly. Only Jews have turned the dilution of our own suffering into a moral ritual.
No one (or at least no one I know) is saying that the answer is cruelty. Jews do not celebrate civilian suffering. We do not surrender our moral instincts. We do not allow the hatred directed at us to make us indifferent to human life.
But empathy requires boundaries. We can care about Palestinian civilians without adopting the Palestinian narrative. We can mourn innocent deaths without acting like Israel was pining for this war. We can debate individual Israeli decisions without condemning the legitimacy of the entire campaign. We can expect moral conduct from Israel without demanding national suicide. We can hope for a better Palestinian future while recognizing that such a future is almost entirely (and has almost entirely been) in the Palestinians’ own hands.
And most importantly, we can discuss Jewish suffering without immediately placing it beside someone else’s suffering to make it more socially acceptable. We are permitted to mourn our own people. We are permitted to fear for our own future. We are permitted to prioritize Jewish safety. We are permitted to say that the suffering caused by a war does not erase the reason the war is being fought.
The Jewish problem is not that we possess too much empathy. Empathy is one of our greatest strengths. It has shaped our ethics, our communities, and our understanding of responsibility. The problem begins when empathy is detached from judgment.
Empathy without judgment cannot distinguish the victim from the aggressor. Empathy without responsibility rewards those who create suffering. Empathy without boundaries teaches Jews that everyone’s life must be protected except our own.
That is the folly of Jews “feeling bad” for Palestinians — not that we recognize Palestinian humanity, but that we so often believe recognizing their humanity requires us to deny our own.
 | A guest post by
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The world demands a sick asymmetry from Jews. Palestinians may rage, hate, indoctrinate, celebrate terror, deny atrocities, and launch wars from civilian areas, while Jews must prove moral worth by grieving louder for the other side than for themselves. That is not compassion. It is psychological warfare. Empathy without judgment rewards the aggressor. Empathy without boundaries teaches Jews that everyone’s safety matters except theirs. Israel must fight with discipline, law, and conscience. But it must fight. No nation has a duty to die politely so its enemies can retain comfort, narrative control, and another chance to murder.
I've only read half the article, so far, but I have to say this: We are in war mode. When in war mode, I do not feel compelled AT ALL to feel empathy for my enemy. Sorry, don't have that emotional band width and besides, I think it's out of place AND dangerous. You cannot do the awful things you must do when at war if you are worrying about the "innocent civilians" on the other side. Doesn't work that way, as the article points out. As I always say, we must be Athens, but Sparta when it's necessary; and then we must go back to being Athens. Right now I'm Sparta. To the suffering Palestinians I advise: get your own act together. It's not my job.