I visited for the first time around this year. It was incredible. The people were so nice. The Palestinian children I met in Israel were incredibly rude and surprisingly well-dressed considering we were all playing on a playground. My aunt and cousins were translating what they were saying to me and encouraging me to say rude things back that they’d translate. Reflecting on that: weird fucking experience and incredibly sad overall.

The people within Palestine were so polite, accommodating, and eager to share their culture. Many of them appeared to have meager means, but seemed so happy.

I saw an old Jewish man fall from a chair and hit his head on the stone ground near the western wall. Blood sprayed out and began quickly pooling. His family rushed to his side, but most of my fellow Jews ran away. Some to seek aid, most to flee from the inauspicious event at this holy site. But the most people who rushed to directly help this man we’re Arabs, presumably Palestinian, using their nicest holy garments to help a bleeding stranger and offering him water.

Years later, it hit me: the rude rich Palestinians I met at the playground weren’t acting that way due to cultural or religious differences, it’s because they were rich assholes repeating rich asshole shit. And their presence at the playground was only because their family could afford to live in Israel. But my aunt and cousin? They absolutely were making everything about race and religion. It had been trained into them and they were trying to train me. This was all pre-Netanyahu.

When my cousin got older, he started taking classes to learn Aramaic and Arabic so that he “could understand the enemy better” for intelligence purposes and tell them in their own language that he was going to kill them. He became a volunteer police assistant so that he could get gun training. Then he was allowed to police areas with high Palestinian populations.

It was during this that he learned how incredible Palestinians were and that most of their aggression was due to misinformation and fear. He never killed a single Palestinian and eventually became a more vocal advocate for their human rights. He knew that, given the chance, they’d kill him in a heartbeat but he also recognized that the impulse was driven into them by oppressive regimes. He even got the rest of his family to recognize the fraught existence of being treated like an unwelcome guest in your own home. A fugitive for merely existing…

When I visited Israel years later, I was being driven out to the military base to visit another cousin. Israel had expanded its borders; next to the highway where we were traveling, I saw fenced off vacant homes with tanks driving through them. “Oh cool!” I said, “are they doing training over there?” My cousin’s parents sadly explained to me that I was looking into Palestine. The people had been temporarily evacuated from their homes and the Israeli government was ensuring that “they won’t have homes to return to.”

After October 7, the first cousin I talked about hasn’t been the same… His unit was one of the first reactivated and mobilized; he was at the site within half an hour of the attack. What he saw of the dead and mangled still haunts him. The things he’s seen and done that go completely against his moral compass… The guy who used to laugh and tell me stories about getting stabbed by a Palestinian at a checkpoint and only arrested her because he’d do the same in her position; the guy who has caught and thrown grenades avoiding casualties; the guy who was arrested for refusing to needlessly fire into a crowd of protesting Palestinians. His clean conscience appears to be gone and sometimes he just disappears into whatever dark images he can’t seem to shake.

The place you see in that photo probably is gone. The people are gone. They were gradually eroded away. Any hope I had to see them again disappeared after October 7. The Israel I remember is gone, too… It’s been fanned into an inferno of hated that will likely last generations. The spirit of the Palestinians can’t be erased, though. I hope someday to see that spirit reflected in their society. I hope to see the warmth I remember of Israel shared once again by its people.

I hope that the next time I see my cousin that he remembers all the good he’s done and that he’s accepted what he’s done. I imagine he’d sooner go AWOL. I wish Israel and Palestine could forgive and reconcile, but I’ve lost about all hope to see humans treating each other humanely in that region within my lifetime…