A few months ago, my brother stood in line at a coffee shop in Southern California. Tanned with olive skin, dark hair and hazel eyes, my brother walks a thin line between sun-kissed Californian and something more foreign; in the case of P, this is the skin of our Syrian father. The man in front of him is on the phone, gesturing and speaking in a language that P and I do not understand but know well. P has been self-studying Arabic here and there – two years ago he bought an Arabic grammar book, and our bi-monthly calls between St. Louis and California often dedicate a moment to some phrase he’s picked up on Duolingo. We did not grow up with the language; whatever whispers of Arabic shared between my Teta and me have long disappeared into memory. The connection P and I hold to Syria is distant and strained; labneh and pita for breakfast, my father’s soft, near indiscernible extension of vowels, an Instagram follow request from a third cousin. It is enough, though, for some friendly conversation between strangers, and in the awkward silence spent waiting for their coffee P strikes up an introduction. The man, it turns out, was Syrian too. Questions ensue: what city is your father from; what is your last name; why don’t you speak Arabic; where is your mother from? An interrogation of religion, allegiance, kind; centuries of conflict veiled as curiosity, politely probing if you are enemy or friend. P seemed to have answered well, at first: Damascus; the decidedly Muslim Zeineddin; we were just never taught. With each answer, the man visibly relaxes. The conversation shifts: lighthearted banter on the beauty of Syrian women, the best place to buy good olive oil around here, a shared craving for proper foul mudammas – a brief tug upon those strained, distant ties; a fleeting reminder of that possible world where my brother and I were decidedly Arab. P has been sorted into the right category, regardless of his absent Arabic. This, after all, could be learned, altered, changed. Last names cannot. 

Then comes our mother. P explains that she is white. European. He stops there, hesitant to go on. To explain that her father had been a New Jersey Jew, and that she was raised — as we were — Christian. The man hardens. The kindness that lived in his eyes has died and been replaced with a weird, awful glare. He tells my brother that our parents had made a mistake. He stares at my brother with hate. 

How does a friendly conversation at a bagel shop turn into a renunciation? How is it that, in a matter of an instant, a person’s humanity is ripped from them, torn from their being, their existence proclaimed a mistake? Why do we build these walls between us, constructing groups and distinctions and lose ourselves within them, walls so high that we blind ourselves to those outside of them? These are the questions which run through my mind, and which now pulse and throb with unbearable intensity.

The past weeks have been filled with utter horror. I have spent most nights in front of the TV, staring blankly at the strange fluorescence of death and blood and tears emanating from the screen. I feel myself slipping away in the aerial shots of devastated Gaza, reduced to rubble; the pleadings of an Israeli mother for the return of her abducted son; the testimony of a Palestinian woman, denied evacuation, resigning to the fact that she will die in her house.

To whom do I owe my alliance? To the cousins of my mother or the cousins of my father? On Instagram are reposts of tidy infographics, ‘explanations’ of the situations, forceful attacks against one side or the other, blatant downplaying of the murders of Israeli children or the forced displacement of Palestinians. Both posts claim the moral high ground, the objective and definite authority, the words written with the self-assured confidence of standing on the right side of history. One group is afforded radical empathy, and another is lost behind the height of the wall. Their struggles become an apathetic footnote, a necessary means to an end. Our circle of empathy wanes, and we grow to hate those who are left outside of it. A hatred that leads to dehumanization, to professors of genomics decrying Palestinians as “rabid animals that need to be put down”, to the cheering on of the slaughter of 1400 innocents.

I do not owe my allegiance to any side, because no side should exist at all. The idea of sides is built on false distinction. That there is something truly different about people who live 30 miles apart, who both care for their families, who possess memories and aspirations and dreams. Who have these things stolen away from them. We separate, distinguish, otherize. We make ourselves blind to the other’s humanity. We make ourselves blind to the fact that there is no other, that the walls we’ve built are invisible. 

It should be clear that any attack on any human is injustice; it is our moral obligation to free ourselves from these narrow walls, to recognize the humanity in one another and raise our voices against all forms of violence. You can support the rights and lives of Palestinians and condemn the brutality in Hamas within the same breath; you can mourn the lives of Israelis and speak out against indiscriminate bombing and mass displacement. More than can — you must. 

What is happening now is not new. I recognize that my own words are not revolutionary, or nuanced, or even well-formed. I don’t expect this to cause some massive ripple throughout campus — a collective “raising of the consciousness”, where pro-Palestinians and pro-Israelis will begin walking together hand in hand. But I must at least try. Action, however futile, is better than my dazed paralysis on the couch, suffocating against those constant waves of horror blasting from the television.

I recognize that I am far removed from the situation. I am sitting here now, in front of a computer in the middle of the United States. As I said before, whatever connections I hold to my Jewish and Arab heritage are distant and strained. But where these distant connections have failed me in identity, they have gifted me with empathy. For those whose families are affected, or know friends among the dead, this empathy will not come easy. But I hope, for the sake of the living and the dead, we learn how to topple our walls and extend our circles.