Children of the Same Father

[May 2026]

וַיִּגְוַ֨ע וַיָּ֧מׇת אַבְרָהָ֛ם בְּשֵׂיבָ֥ה טוֹבָ֖ה זָקֵ֣ן וְשָׂבֵ֑עַ וַיֵּאָ֖סֶף אֶל־עַמָּֽיו׃

וַיִּקְבְּר֨וּ אֹת֜וֹ יִצְחָ֤ק וְיִשְׁמָעֵאל֙ בָּנָ֔יו אֶל־מְעָרַ֖ת הַמַּכְפֵּלָ֑ה אֶל־שְׂדֵ֞ה עֶפְרֹ֤ן בֶּן־צֹ֙חַר֙

 הַֽחִתִּ֔י אֲשֶׁ֖ר עַל־פְּנֵ֥י מַמְרֵֽא׃

​

And Abraham breathed his last, dying at a good ripe age, old and contented; and he was gathered to his kin.

His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre.

-Bereshit (Genesis) 25

​​When I read Torah, I do not see a story about strangers. I see a story about family. Messy family. Loving family. Violent family. Broken family. A family capable of tenderness one moment and horrifying cruelty the next. That is one of the things I appreciate about Jewish tradition. It rarely sanitizes human beings. The patriarchs are not presented as flawless saints floating above history. They are people. They lie, manipulate, grieve, rage, make terrible decisions, reconcile, fail to reconcile, and carry trauma forward into the next generation.

From a theological perspective, Yitzhak (Isaac) and Ishmael were brothers. Jews and Arabs both trace spiritual ancestry back to Avraham. That matters to me deeply. Not in some shallow Hallmark-card sense. Not in the sense that saying it magically resolves occupation, terrorism, war crimes, apartheid, checkpoints, rockets, massacres, displacement, or the unbearable grief that now saturates the land. It does not erase bloodshed. It does not erase the dead. It does not erase October 7th. It does not erase what the state of Israel is doing to Gaza. It does not erase generations of fear and fury.

But symbolically and spiritually, it matters.

Because when I look at Israelis and Palestinians, I do not see two species of alien enemies doomed by fate to slaughter each other forever.

​I see a catastrophically broken family.

I see cousins who no longer recognize each other as human.

I see trauma being passed down like an inheritance. Fear passed from parent to child. Hatred taught at kitchen tables and absorbed through funerals, air raid sirens, bombed apartment buildings, militant propaganda, military occupation, and graves. I see people who are so psychologically wounded that many of them genuinely cannot imagine the other side as fully real anymore.

And honestly, after everything that has happened, I understand how people get there.

If your family was murdered by Hamas, your soul is never going to be the same again. If your child was pulled from rubble in Gaza, your soul is never going to be the same again. Human beings are not machines. Trauma changes people. Collective trauma changes entire societies.

Jews know this intimately. So do Palestinians.

Jewish history is soaked in catastrophe. Pogroms. Expulsions. Ghettos. The Holocaust. Centuries of being treated as pollutants contaminating whatever nation we lived in. The constant awareness that safety could evaporate overnight. The knowledge that your neighbors could turn on you in a fucking heartbeat. That kind of historical memory does not vanish just because Israel exists now.

And Palestinians carry catastrophe too. The Nakba, and its continued aftermath, is not some abstract historical footnote to them. It is living memory. Displacement. Statelessness. Humiliation. Military domination. Occupation. Watching the world debate whether your suffering is even real enough to count.

You cannot build peace on top of denied pain.

That is one of the things that drives me insane about so much discourse surrounding this conflict. Everybody wants exclusive ownership of suffering. Everybody wants their dead to matter more. Everybody wants moral monopoly. People act as though acknowledging the humanity of one side somehow betrays the other.

I reject that completely.

I can mourn murdered Israelis without becoming indifferent to dead Palestinian children.

I can condemn Hamas and also condemn the Israeli government.

I can understand why Jews fear annihilation without supporting endless military brutality.

I can understand Palestinian rage without supporting antisemitism or jihadism.

Human suffering is not a competitive sport.

And because I view this conflict through a spiritual lens as well as a political one, the family aspect keeps haunting me.

The Torah itself contains family estrangements everywhere. Brothers at war. Brothers betraying brothers. Cain and Abel. Jacob and Esau. Joseph and his brothers. The entire damn Bereshit (Book of Genesis) feels like a meditation on inheritance, favoritism, resentment, exile, and reconciliation. Families wound each other in ways strangers cannot. The deepest scars are often inflicted by people bound together by blood, memory, and love twisted into something poisonous.

That is part of why this conflict feels so spiritually devastating to me.

Because beneath all the nationalism and geopolitics, there is something horrifying about descendants of Avraham seeing each other as monsters.

And yes, I know people will roll their eyes at this. Some people think any spiritual framing is naïve. Some think religion itself is the problem. Others think the idea of reconciliation is impossible now.

Maybe they are partly right about the scale of the damage. I am not naïve enough to think people can sing kumbaya their way out of this nightmare. We are talking about generations of bloodshed. We are talking about children raised under bombardment and children raised doing active shooter drills because they fear terrorists breaking through fences to massacre civilians. We are talking about people radicalized by grief so profound that vengeance starts to feel holy.

That kind of damage does not disappear because someone posts a peace slogan online.

Real reconciliation would require terrifying levels of honesty.

Israelis would have to confront what occupation and dehumanization have done to Palestinians.

Palestinians would have to confront antisemitism within their own movements and the moral horror of targeting civilians.

The entire world would have to stop treating this conflict like a fucking sports rivalry where people cheer for corpses depending on which flag the victims belong to.

And maybe hardest of all, both peoples would have to stop seeing compassion as surrender.

Because right now, empathy itself is treated like treason.

If you acknowledge Palestinian suffering in some Jewish spaces, you are accused of betraying your people.

If you acknowledge Jewish suffering in some pro-Palestine spaces, you are accused of excusing genocide.

People are spiritually addicted to purity and tribalism. Nuance gets eaten alive. Grief gets weaponized. Historical memory becomes ammunition.

But I keep returning to Avraham.

I keep returning to the image of Yitzhak and Ishmael.

According to tradition, they reunited to bury their father.

That detail destroys me emotionally every time I think about it.

After everything. After exile. After bitterness. After separation. The brothers stood together to mourn.

Not because the conflict between them had never existed. Not because the wounds were fake. Not because history was simple.

But because somewhere beneath all the pain, they were still family.

That feels unbearably relevant now.

And before anyone accuses me of romanticizing things, let me be clear. Families can become abusive. Families can destroy each other. Family bonds alone do not guarantee peace or safety or justice. Sometimes relatives become enemies. Sometimes reconciliation fails.

But the symbolic truth still matters to me.

The idea that Jews and Palestinians are forever doomed to mutual extermination is spiritually unacceptable to me.

I refuse it.

I refuse the worldview that says hatred is eternal and empathy is impossible.

I refuse the idea that the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael are cosmically destined to butcher each other forever while politicians and extremists profit from the blood.

Because if this conflict is ultimately a family rupture, then peace is not merely diplomacy. It is teshuvah on a collective scale. A turning back toward human recognition. A refusal to let trauma have the final word forever.

And no, I do not know how we get there from here. Frankly, right now it feels almost unimaginably far away. The rage is too fresh. The bodies are too recent. The trust has been obliterated over and over again. The war is still continuing.

But I know this much.

Jews are not disappearing.

Palestinians are not disappearing.

Neither side is going to magically evaporate because the other side hates them hard enough.

So eventually, somehow, the descendants of Isaac and the descendants of Ishmael are going to have to find a way to exist on this planet together without constantly drowning the land in blood.

And on the deepest spiritual level, I believe that would not merely be a political agreement.

It would be a family reunion after a very long nightmare.

Further reading: ​The birth of a Jewish-Palestinian Army of Healers | The Jerusalem Post