As a human being of Jewish heritage, I feel deeply ashamed by what Israel is acting out in Gaza. I feel so shocked by the horror of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians that it has literally taken me a few weeks to sufficiently integrate the trauma which has gotten triggered within me so that I could begin to find words. I feel as if I am sitting in the audience watching a family member who I love perform on stage, and because of my intimate connection and identification with my beloved family member, I am completely mortified by what I see them unconsciously acting out in the world theater. I am rendered numb and speechless, as my face turns pale and my breath is taken away by the extent of Israel’s criminal and moral insanity. It is like watching a dark, destructive inhuman energy making a people its instrument. How we understand what is happening in Gaza depends upon where we start looking in time. The Israeli-influenced U. S. government/mainstream-media’s propaganda starts the narrative at the missiles being shot by Hamas, who are considered the terrorists, without asking the relevant question - why is Hamas shooting off missiles in the first place? Though Hamas shooting rockets into Israel can in no way be condoned, when we look at the situation in a broader context, we see that Hamas is terrorizing Israel in response to the terror, genocide and holocaust being perpetrated by Israel upon the Palestinians. Hamas is lobbing missiles into Israel to publicize the plight of the Palestinians, to bring international attention to the fact that they are being imprisoned and starved to death, as Israel has not been permitting sufficient food, water, fuel and medicine into the death camp which is Gaza.

There is an insidious double-bind inherent in their conflict. Both Israel and the Palestinians are afraid, and therefore unable to do themselves the very thing they need the other to do, which is to stop the violence. Israel wants security. And the Palestinians just want to be free of Israel’s illegal occupation and have the right to their own self-determination. Israel wants Hamas to stop shooting its missiles into Israel. Hamas insists they will stop if Israel stops oppressing them and gives back to the Palestinians their intrinsic right to exist in freedom. Israel, in its flawless illogic, is afraid to let the Palestinians be free of their domination because it imagines that the Palestinians will then shoot rockets at it, thereby creating as well as perpetuating the very situation it doesn’t want (please see my article “Delusions of Separation”).

To resolve the deadlock, Israel, being in the position of having infinitely more power than the Palestinians, has to be the figure which takes the first step out of the infinite regression. Those with the most power are undoubtedly in a better position to fix a problem than those with the least. Holding the power in its very hands, Israel has it within its grasp to stop abusing it. You can only let go of something if you fully possess it. The fact that Israel is wielding its overwhelming power in a way which creates the very thing it is afraid of is the signature of the traumatized soul caught in the act.

TRAUMA IS AN ENTITY ALL ITS OWN

Israel is a nation in trauma, which is a form of collective madness. Trauma is a form of psychological damage rooted in a kind of vital shock to the organism. When we are in trauma, we unconsciously act out the unhealed trauma both within ourselves and out in the world, traumatizing and terrorizing others as we simultaneously re-traumatize ourselves. There is a newly emerging scientific understanding of trauma that describes its underlying bio-energetic logic and illumines how unhealed trauma warps and alters the emotional and psychological lives of human beings. Understanding how trauma operates in the human psyche and exhibits itself through behavior in the outer world will help us to illumine the underlying, deeper process animating events in Gaza. As we understand the deeper process in-forming events in Gaza, we reciprocally deepen our understanding of the trauma within ourselves, for no human alive today is free from trauma and/or the effects of trauma.

Trauma is a unique phenomenon all its own, as if it is an entity in and of itself. When we are traumatized, our creative life-force becomes frozen back in time, locked in the shock of the traumatizing event. Trauma is not a noun or a thing, but a verb, in that it is a dynamic process which has a timeless dimension yet also unfolds over time. Unresolved trauma employs itself as it attempts to work itself out over the course of time, as its spirit gets passed down through multiple generations. Trauma happens when we suffer an overwhelming event which we cannot assimilate into our being in the typical way. When traumatized, our attempts to heal from our trauma tend to be dysfunctional and are themselves the very actions which animates in ourselves, extends to others and thereby re-creates the trauma we are trying to heal from in what becomes a diabolically self-perpetuating negative feedback loop which is truly crazy-making and seemingly has no end or exit strategy.

The trauma animating events in Gaza can be more deeply understood when we contemplate the nature of trauma in the context of the field dynamics inherent in family systems. In family systems, abuse is a ritual which is collectively and collaboratively enacted, which is to say that everyone in the field picks up a different inter-dependent role which weaves together the tapestry of the whole family dynamic. The Israelis and the Palestinians switch roles over time, as they both at certain moments in time have alternately played the role of the victim and/or the abuser, justifying their violence based on the abuse by the other. In this moment in time, however, in this scene of the play we are in, Israel is the one who is unconsciously playing the role of the abuser, and it is important to not pretend this isn’t so.

When we have unhealed abuse, we inadvertently abuse others. When we are unconsciously acting out our trauma, we are not in the driver’s seat, but rather, we ourselves are being compulsively driven by the trauma. Freud found in trauma a “daemonic force at work.” The term “daemonic” refers to a transpersonal (beyond the personal) energy which irrupts from a deeper level of our being and can possess the ego (of a person or a nation), causing them to become its instruments. Encoded in the daemonic is creative power, which if not honored and constructively expressed constellates in its “demonic,” and hence, destructive form. When we are in trauma, the trauma is using us as its agents of articulation, as it compels us to literally materialize and express its essential dynamic in symbolic but living form. The nature of unhealed trauma is to demand the transmission of its lineage in the outside world. Trauma is a conduit through which an atemporal, archetypal process existing deep inside the human soul becomes visible in form and manifests and extends itself in the realm of linear time, which is to say that trauma, besides being a horror, is also potentially a transformative revelation.

When we are in trauma, we of necessity traumatize others, as if we can’t help ourselves. Trauma’s medium of expression is not localized in one individual, but rather, trauma is a collective process which manifests “nonlocally” (not bound by the conventional laws of time and space) throughout the entire field. Because of its interactive nature with the surrounding field, trauma cannot be comprehended if we view ourselves as isolated entities separate from the field. Israel and the Palestinians don’t exist in isolation from each other, but rather in intimate co-relation to each other. The violence that is being perpetrated between these two polarized agencies couldn’t happen without their mutual, co-operative antagonism. The adversarial roles they are playing are reciprocally co-arising and mutually conditioning each other, as if they are contained in and an expression of a deeper unified and unifying field. The Israelis and Palestinians are in-formed by and collaboratively re-enacting a deeper archetypal process, which is revealing itself through their interactions.

Trauma is a nonlocal field phenomenon which pervades the entire field of consciousness. It is like a higher-dimensional virus, a bug in the system whose nature is to spread and propagate itself throughout the field, branding and enlisting people to be its instruments of proliferation. At the same time that trauma is a nonlocal field phenomenon, it is also an extremely localized crystallization of a higher-dimensional process which is literally bleeding through into our third dimensional world. Nonlocal in nature, trauma is simultaneously an acutely local phenomenon in that it is happening within each one of us.

In Gaza, a role reversal has taken place – the Jewish people, the victim of unresolved trauma that they suffered not only during the Second World War, but throughout their history, have now become the perpetrators. One of the things unique about trauma is that in the process of integrating and healing from trauma, we are compelled to unconsciously act out the role of the abuser. Israel, to the extent it hasn’t dealt with its own trauma, has split-off from and at the same time internalized the abuser, while unconsciously identifying with its original aggression, which is a common characteristic of the traumatized soul. To dissociate from and be unconsciously identified with the sadistic aggressor who perpetrated the original trauma is to become possessed by this figure, to be lethally compelled to act out its violence in a terrorizing, malevolent and life-destroying way. In an appalling reversal of the golden rule, Israel is doing unto others what was done unto it. In the open-air death camp by the sea which is Gaza, the Jewish people have re-created their experience in World War II, with the Palestinians playing the roles that the Jews played in the Warsaw ghetto.

Terrorism is the re-creation and the ritual re-enactment of the original trauma, only with the roles reversed. In unconsciously “outgassing” - which is the slow release of a gas that is trapped and frozen in matter (in this case, the matter is the psyche) - their trauma, Israel unbinds itself in an orgasmic discharge of inner, frustrated destructiveness freed from all restraints in order to attain the complete reversal of its inner condition. Ironically, Israel is advertising how it is acting “with restraint,” an idea which only cultivates further terror.

What we don’t remember, we act out on others, as the other in ourselves acts itself out through our unconscious. When we are traumatized, we compulsively give shape to our trauma by trying to kill in others what has been seemingly killed in ourselves. When we act out our unhealed trauma upon someone, we induce in them the feeling we had when we were traumatized, as if we are reducing them to the feeling which we are not able to feel ourselves.

To the extent that Israel is allowed to get away with murder, a thermonuclear rage is generated within the collective unconscious of the Palestinians as a natural, karmic, retroactive outgrowth of the violence and injustice being perpetrated upon them by the Israelis. In their actions, the Israelis are putting the gas on, fanning the flames and kindling the fire of the never-ending cycle of retributive violence. Interestingly, the word “karma” refers to one’s own doing, which is to say that what we experience as karma is the fruition of our own actions.

There is only one thing for sure about what Israel is doing - its actions are guaranteed to make it less safe, as however many members of Hamas it kills, it will give birth to ten times more people in the Muslim world who want Israel destroyed. In their insane actions, the Israelis are unwittingly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy which will ultimately destroy them if not illumined. By trying to make themselves safe, they are turning the wheel of karmic blowback and adding energy to the rotary engines of their own self-destruction.

THE ORIGIN OF TRAUMA IS THE PSYCHE

Both the origin and resolution of the dis-ease of trauma are to be found within the human psyche. Understanding the underlying bio-energetic logic and psychological dynamics of trauma empowers us to transform it at its roots, which is the psyche itself. Shadow projection, a process in which we split-off from and project outside of ourselves our darker, inferior and disowned parts, is the deep, core psychological process which is fueling the events in Gaza (please see my article “Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War”). Psychologically speaking, the Israelis and the Palestinians are bound together in an intimate dance of projecting the shadow onto each other, a process which is simultaneously the cause and effect of the collective psychosis they are enacting and which also pervades the field at large. The process of collective, mutual shadow projection insures that in and over time both Israel and the Palestinians will become possessed by the shadow they project onto the other.

Paradoxically, the Palestinians, seen symbolically as shadow reflections of Israel’s psyche, represent the Israelis own despised weakness, which evokes revulsion and must be destroyed, while at the same time embodying the malevolent other, which evokes fear and therefore must also be destroyed.

The deepest trauma always has to do with the part of us that is most vulnerable. Instead of consciously feeling their pain and vulnerability, the Israelis are trying to destroy anyone who reminds them of it. What the Israelis are acting out on the world stage is a reflection of Israel’s internal, psychological process of trying to exterminate its own feelings of vulnerability and weakness. Intrinsic to trauma is the double-bind of having to deny what cannot be forgotten. Psychologically speaking, Israel’s actions are a frantic attempt at postponing the inevitable return of the repressed.

The feeling of powerlessness is the origin of terrorism. Israel’s terrorizing behavior reduces the Palestinians to a state of utter helplessness, which only feeds future terrorism. In its misguided attempts to unconsciously compensate for its own feelings of powerlessness, what Israel is doing in trying to protect itself is a convoluted, perverse and destructive way of trying to step into its power and authority. Playing the archetypal role of the abuser to perfection, Israel abuses its power simply because it can get away with it, which is morally indefensible. When Israel misuses their greater power by reacting with orders of magnitude greater violence than their attackers, they lose any claim or pretense to a higher moral ground.

Seen symbolically, the Palestinians reflect back to the Israelis their unconscious guilt, as deep down in the depths of their souls, the Jewish people know they are breaking the law of human decency, which is to say the law of God. It is impossible for people to not feel guilty in their unconscious when they are acting out their abuse. This guilt, however, is the very feeling they split-off from consciously experiencing, which in a vicious circle is the very thing animating their guilt in the first place. The Israelis dissociating from their guilt and continuing to project it onto the Palestinians animates what they unconsciously feel guilty about, which further fuels their compulsion to eradicate the ones who remind them of their guilt in a self-reinforcing feedback loop which inevitably results in self-destruction for everyone involved. This is the nature of un-illumined trauma, as if the entity of trauma develops an autonomous life of its own and consumes its host if it is not properly metabolized. To the extent that we are unwilling and unable to consciously experience our feelings of guilt is the extent to which we are guilty of unconsciously enacting something to feel guilty about.

In dissociating from and projecting out its shadow onto the Palestinians, Israel dehumanizes the Palestinians, which feeds into its racist belief that a Jewish life is worth more than a Palestinian life. To protect itself from realizing its state of inner depravity, Israel entrances itself by its own shadow projections and starts believing its own lies, identifying with a one-sidedly self-righteous and virtuous image of itself which legitimizes its atrocities in its own deluded mind. Any reflection which threatens this self-image is demonized and kept at arm’s length, as it threatens the lie inherent in its illusions, which must be protected at all costs.

WE ARE ALL COMPLICIT

Israel, being in the role of the abuser, (arche)typically blames the Palestinians, the victims of their abuse, for causing them to act so abusively, as if they themselves have no responsibility for or control over the choices they are making. Blaming the victim is a classic pattern that gets played out in all situations of abuse. Embodying the role of the archetypical abuser, Israel imagines itself to be the innocent victim, and yet in reality it is enacting the role of the perpetrator disguised as the victim. Like any abuser in a family system, it could only get away with its crimes with the silence, and collusion of others in the family system, which in this case is the world community – US.

In its enactment of war crimes, Israel is a nation gone mad. Israel has become a rogue state that doesn’t abide by international law, has weapons of mass destruction, and enacts terrorism – simply defined as coercive threats or violent acts perpetrated on innocent civilians for political ends. And like a typical family system, related figures who are in the position of not only condemning the abuse but have the power to stop it, like the United States, are instead complicit in, enabling and openly supporting the abuse. For example, the U. S. blocked a United Nations Security Council statement calling for an immediate ceasefire, blames Hamas for the conflict and continues to supply weapons for Israel to use in its war crimes.

The U.S. supports Israel because Israel’s madness is a reflection of its own. The trauma which Israel is re-enacting is a reflection of the abuse which the U.S. has enacted throughout its history, starting at the birth of itself as a nation with the oppression and genocide it perpetrated on the indigenous, Native Americans. Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians is also a mirror of the U. S’s abuse in Iraq, so of course the U.S. would see nothing wrong with what Israel is doing. In addition, Israel’s abuse upon the Palestinians is analogous to how the U.S. implicitly threatens or forcibly imposes its military dominance upon the rest of the world.

Israel and the U.S. are seeing the world through their shared blind-spot, which is the opposite of being conscious. When someone’s craziness reflects and resonates with our own, we insanely see them as being sane. Not recognizing their madness helps us to hide from our own. Israel and the U. S. are co-dependently entangled in a dysfunctional relationship in which they feed into and off of each other’s madness, endlessly reinforcing their mutual delusion in a collective, as compared to an individual, psychosis (please see my article “Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic”).

As is typical in a family system where the culture of abuse thrives, the figures who abuse their power lie and cover-up the truth so as to protect their self-serving agenda. There is good reason Israel didn’t let journalists into Gaza to see the hell-realm which was created as a result of its invasion. Israel then is able to influence the dialogue, particularly in collaboration with the mainstream American media, putting out disinformation through the “perception management” arm of its war machine, as it wages a war on our minds (please see my article “The War on Consciousness.”). I wonder how many Americans realize that Hamas, the democratically elected government of the Palestinians, has been calling for a two-state solution for some time.

The Israeli/American propaganda implicitly defines Hamas as the “terrorist,” which if unthinkingly assumed to be a given, immediately short-circuits any real dialogue due to its intrinsic one-sidedness. To concretize Hamas as being the terrorist is to fall under a form of mind-control which disables us from being able to discern who the real terrorist is. The similarity to how the U. S. frames the “Global War on Terror,” as being between the good guys (the U. S.) and the “terrorists” is striking in its similarity. Who is the real terrorist? The answer goes something like this: The figure of the terrorist is a fluid and ever-shifting role in the field that is being acted out at different moments by various participants in the conflict.

It feels crazy-making when Israel claims to be peace-loving as they drop bombs on the Palestinians, killing innocent civilians in the name of peace and security. A cognitive dissonance gets constellated in our mind when we experience such contradictory double signals. Being interconnected with each other, when the unconscious manifests in the collective field through the Israelis outgassing their unhealed trauma, it nonlocally triggers everyone’s unconscious trauma. Seeing Israel enacting its trauma is traumatizing, as its trauma affects all of us because we are all connected. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King, “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

THE REVELATORY NATURE OF TRAUMA

The Israelis, by being so possessed and taken over by the unconscious, are acting out the unconscious on the world stage in such a way so as to be the unconscious’ revelation in fully-embodied form. What is playing out in Gaza is a re-creation of a timeless, archetypal process which has reiterated itself over, in, and through linear time like an endlessly repeating fractal (please see my article “Archetypal Dimensions of World Events”). Israel and the Palestinians are unwittingly stepping into and embodying in amplified form the deeper, archetypal pattern of trauma and abuse which has seared and imprinted itself in the collective unconscious and has played itself out throughout history. This archetypal pattern of trauma is multi-dimensional, which is to say that it plays itself out intra-personally (within ourselves) and inter-personally (between ourselves) at the same time, which is to say that the microcosm and the macrocosm are reflections of each other.

Witnessing trauma out in the world is traumatizing, in that in no time whatsoever it constellates itself within us. When we recognize that Israel is perpetrating war crimes, we allow ourselves to be shaken to the core, and something inside of us becomes ignited and set aflame. Instead of trying to destroy what made us feel this way, we then have the precious opportunity to simply feel what has gotten activated within us. Feeling into what inside of ourselves becomes triggered is the portal through which our own personal, seemingly solid, cast-in-stone and calcified trauma begins to melt, liquefy and fluidly transform itself into the revelation it has always potentially been.

We are a species in trauma. What is playing out in Gaza is a materialized reflection in symbolic form of our own self-abuse. To truly recognize the archetypal pattern of evil that Israel is playing out is to realize that this is a reflection of the potential for evil inside each one of us. Just like Israel, we are all unconsciously enacting our unhealed trauma in destructive ways through our relationship with ourselves and others. Just like a dream, our universe is a living oracle, a continually unfolding revelation which speaks by configuring events into a symbol of itself. Once we recognize what the situation in Gaza is symbolically re-presenting to us, just like when we let the deeper meaning of a symbol touch us and penetrate to the core of our being, our consciousness expands.

Seen symbolically, the madness that is being re-enacted in Gaza is a localized inflammation of a nonlocal psychic epidemic which pervades the entire field of consciousness, rendering in visible form the collective psychosis which is enfolded throughout the planetary body politic (See my article “Middle East Madness”). Just as each piece of a hologram contains the whole hologram, what is happening in Gaza is an acute outbreak that reflects what is playing out both inside of each one of us as well as being the world’s process. Seen as a larger-scaled iteration of the same inter-nested fractal which is incarnating itself through each one of us in our personal lives, Israel is literally and symbolically acting out its, and by extension, our trauma, writ large on the world stage.

In committing war crimes on the world stage for all to witness, Israel is revealing how it was the victim of criminal acts in the past. In acting out its abuse, it is revealing to us how horribly it has been abused. The Jewish people are understandably still reeling from the so over-the-top it’s completely-unimaginable-but-true trauma of the not-so-long-ago Nazi death camps in which the world looked away and fell silent. Just like a new carpet emits, releases and outgasses the toxins trapped in it so as to become purified, the Jewish people are outgassing the most noxious vapors imaginable, dis-charging the toxins of their own horrific abuse. Because their personal trauma is at the same time archetypal in nature, which is to say it is a reflection of the spirit of unhealed trauma existing deep within the collective unconscious of humanity, the Jewish people’s outgassing of their trauma allows them to let go of both their personal as well as the collective spirit of trauma which has been hermetically sealed in the cellular memory of our species.

In its outgassing and letting go of its trauma, Israel is passing on the spirit of the abuse to others in the spirit of abuse, while at the same time, the poisonous gas being released from its system is its attempt at self-empowerment and healing. Trauma is a “coincidentia oppositorum,” a conjunction of opposites, which contains within its symptoms the pathology as well as its own healing. Israel is enacting its trauma in full-bodied form onto the Palestinians in an unconscious attempt to integrate the abuser within itself while potentially piecing back together its own experience of being in the role of the Palestinians. In giving life to its trauma, Israel is unconsciously trying to re-member itself, to re-connect with the dis-membered parts of its experience, as it attempts, Humpty-Dumpty like, to put itself back together again from its fragmented and shattered state.

The most insidious effects of trauma are how it dis-associates us from ourselves, as it has a dis-integrating effect upon how we experience ourselves. Due to the horrific trauma it went through in the Nazi death camps, Israel both literally embodies and symbolically re-presents being completely dis-associated from itself, which is to say “unconscious.” Paradoxically, its acting out its unconscious state is potentially in the service of healing. Everything depends upon if consciousness is created through the re-experiencing of the trauma. If Israel insists on remaining unconscious of how its actions are truly criminal in the deepest sense of the word, it is simply re-traumatizing itself and others.

Trauma is a quantum phenomenon, which is to say that both its pathological as well as its medicinal aspects are holographically enfolded in potential within it (please see my article “Shadow Projection is its own Medicine”). Encoded within the shell-shock of trauma are the particular, tailor-made clues for its potential resolution. Just like whether light manifests as a wave or particle depends upon how it is observed, trauma is a phenomenon which is not separate from our own consciousness. How our collective trauma manifests – in its hell-bent, pathological aspect or as evolutionary prodding from the universe catalyzing an expansion of consciousness - depends upon how we dream it (please see my article “It’s All in the Psyche”).

Seen symbolically, Israel is a reflection of the part of us which simultaneously is the victim and perpetrator of abuse. We are all participants implicated in the trauma which Israel is suffering from, as what Israel is enacting on the world stage is our trauma, too. To the extent that we are connected with all beings throughout time and space, we are all inter-related to and complicit in each other’s trauma. Trauma works through the dimension of our being where we are connected with each other.

Seen symbolically, we have all dreamed up the Israelis and Palestinians to play out in objectified form the deeper, archetypal process inspiring our self-abuse, so that we can see it and wake up to it. Recognizing this is to realize that we are not separate from the Israelis or Palestinians, or anyone else for that matter, which allows us to snap out of our delusion of imagining we exist as separate entities. Trauma not only animates the separate self, the separate self itself is the primary trauma. In addition, however, trauma is potentially the catalyst inspiring us to step out of the illusion of the separate self. Stepping out of the fiction of the separate self and recognizing we are all interconnected, interdependent parts of a greater whole who are all on the same side is the very expansion of consciousness which is simultaneously the first and last step to the re-solution of our world crisis.

A CRY FOR COMPASSION

Psychologically speaking, perpetrating inhumane war crimes on the Palestinians is Israel’s extremely perverse way of crying out for help, as by its unconscionable abuses of power Israel is expressing and revealing to us in a most dramatic way how extremely sick and in need of healing it truly is. Israel is a mirror of the wounded, traumatized and mad part of ourselves. The key is how we respond to the shock of this realization.

The natural, organic expression of recognizing that Israel is a mirrored reflection of the part of ourselves which is sick, in need of healing and “knows not what it is doing” is compassion and forgiveness. Feeling compassion and forgiveness for Israel in no way precludes our also recognizing that in its enactment of its unexamined trauma, Israel is guilty of war crimes and needs to be held accountable. Compassion isn’t always smiley-faced and sweet, as sometimes compassion is fierce and sets firm boundaries. Because of the corrupted state it has fallen into, Israel can literally not stop itself from acting out its abuse, which is to say that it desperately needs the world community’s help to curb its ultimately suicidal behavior, as it is in no position to help itself. Because of its deadly effects, Israel’s outgassing of its abuse needs to be alchemically contained so that it can do no further damage to others. In co-operatively coming together in repudiating and saying “no” to Israel’s abusive actions, we are ultimately helping to save Israel from itself.

Abuse can only happen in a family system, be it a nuclear family or a nuclear-ized world community, when people don’t step into their intrinsic power and speak their true voice (please see my article “Breaking the Vow of Silence.”). When we bear witness to someone enacting criminal acts, we instantaneously inherit a moral responsibility to do everything in our power to stop the criminal act, or else in our silence and inaction we become complicit.

People, Jews or non-Jews, who unquestioningly support Israel are simply being complicit in war crimes. They are playing the same roles as family members who are in a position to stop the abuse in the family system and choose instead to support it by siding with the abuser.

What Israel is doing - killing innocent men, women and children who are captive in a prison of Israel’s own making - is a crime against humanity as a whole, which is to say it is a crime against each and every one of us. When innocent people are being slaughtered like they are in Gaza, we are all suffering the tragedy of losing family members. It is not just a Palestinian tragedy, or an Israeli tragedy, but a universal, human tragedy.