The painful process of truly listening to Palestinian pain

Eva Dalak is a Palestinian citizen of Israel born in Jaffa to a family that lived there for generations, but many of whom now live in Gaza. I am a Jewish Israeli, raised in Orthodox Brooklyn, New York.

Together we host a podcast called Women Ending War, a determined effort to change our reality and end this violence.

A core aspect of what we are trying to accomplish is to always incorporate diverse voices. We try to have Palestinian and Jewish women in every episode, though it does not always work out that way.

We also try to create an atmosphere of holding space, even when it’s hard. This means allowing people to tell their life stories without arguing or correcting them. Palestinians on the podcast may use words like “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “colonialism”, and I never challenge or try to “correct” the usage of these terms, despite all the Zionist upbringing that trained me to do exactly that.

I practice what I learned from my friends in nonviolent communication: connect before you correct. It’s a radical-but-shouldn’t-be-so-radical concept about letting another person tell their story and just listening. By holding that space, I am actively rejecting that Bibi-esque behaviour that expects us to debate and badger until we “win”. I am letting go of that entire persona, the one that is supposed to have the last word and school everyone around me in the sound bites about Jewish moral superiority, Zionist righteousness, and the need to squash all criticism.

Just sitting there and listening is a kind of corrective measure — for me and possibly for others around the table. This is not always easy.

There are moments that shake me. Sometimes Palestinians say things that make me wonder if they think all Jews should leave. (Have the people holding “Free Palestine” signs thought about what to do with 8 million Israeli Jews? I wonder).

 As a mother of IDF soldiers, it is hard for me to hear Palestinians’ particular hatred of soldiers. I know that many soldiers are motivated by good values of service, honour, protection, and devotion to their people. I don’t like hearing that so many people in the world consider them to be monsters. Those are my kids we’re talking about.

Even worse, some women refuse to sit at a table with mothers of soldiers. A Palestinian woman named Amal from East Jerusalem told me at my woman’s dialogue group a few years ago that if her family knew that she was sitting around the table with soldiers’ mothers, they would disown her. That was very hard.

Even as I reject my indoctrination, I still live in my real world with real people whom I refuse to classify as bad. Israelis do not deserve to be generalised, stereotyped, or dehumanised any more than Palestinians do.

Sometimes, it’s a tightrope walk for me. But these exchanges are also encouraging, because, after all, Amal showed up. Eva shows up. We are all still talking. And if I can be fully present in the process of reversing the dehumanisation of Palestinians, maybe I’ll get lucky and the world will stop dehumanising my children.

There are other tough moments for me. Many interviewees take for granted that the history of the region can be defined as one of colonialism and ethnic cleansing, that the current war is undeniably a form of genocide, that Palestinians are the real indigenous people, and that this entire land is Palestine.

Even though I still struggle with some of this — for example, I think the word “colonialism” is a misnomer; Jews are not the British Empire, and we are actually arguably indigenous, even if we were mostly absent for 2,000 years — I usually take a position of listening.

I understand why Palestinians use the term “colonialism” to describe Zionist actions of taking over entire villages and replacing them with Jewish settlements. The Zionist takeover of Palestinian land has been violent and appalling, and the Israeli government is still doing it. I drive through Israel looking at signs of towns and cities and think about how many Palestinians were driven out of those places in order for Israel to exist.

 Maybe I am a colonialist, too. Maybe I should go back to Brooklyn, I sometimes think. But I can’t and won’t advocate for that kind of Jewish population transfer as a remedy to accusations of colonialism. A solution has to deal with the reality, and the people whose lives are here right now. There has to be another way.

But it’s painful. And I know I am complicit in Palestinians’ pain. If the word “colonialism” is hard for me to hear, I need to deal with it and face the troubling truth about our history.

 And there’s the genocide thing. In our very first exchange in our very first episode, Eva used the word “genocide”. I knew it would make many Jews cringe, or worse — yell and call me names and cluster me with antisemites and terrorists. I did not argue with Eva’s use of the word or said it’s not true or defended Israel. I sat with it, held space, and listened.

Eva has lost many family members in Gaza, as have other guests on our podcast. And I am certainly not going to tell Palestinians whose families are being relentlessly bombed that they are not experiencing ethnic cleansing or genocide.

We’ve had several conversations and posts about the use of the word genocide in which I explain why I believe it is so important for Jews and Israelis to listen to this and to understand why Palestinians are calling their experiences genocide.

 What Israel is doing in Gaza is appalling and we should be acknowledging that, period, with whatever language works to express the awfulness of it.

The entire exercise with Eva is an experiment in shared society and shared humanity. Can we sit and be present with each other’s truths and life stories, and still share the space — even live on the same land — without violence?

Despite our vastly different experiences, can we have a conversation in which both our lived experiences are valid? Is that possible? Our studio is a microcosm where we attempt to answer these questions.

This article is an edited excerpt from In My Jewish State: How I was trained in pro-Israel advocacy, and how I learned to talk back to my culture, find my own humanity, and fight for peace by Elana Sztokman.