The Weight of Power
Five months after the creation of Israel (Reuters)
They left before dawn, walking east with what they could carry. The road out of their village was lined with others doing the same. Old men pushed carts, women balanced bundles on their heads, and children gripped sleeves so they would not get lost. Smoke rose behind them. Somewhere back there, soldiers were moving from house to house. The sound was distant but steady, the end of something familiar and the beginning of something nameless. They did not call it the Nakba then, not yet. They just knew they could not go home.
In the months that followed, hundreds of thousands would do the same. More than seven hundred villages were emptied or destroyed. Communities that had existed for centuries vanished in a single season. Some fled in panic after hearing what happened at Deir Yassin, where over a hundred civilians were killed. Others were driven out at gunpoint or left believing they would return when the fighting ended. But they never did. Their homes were claimed by the new state of Israel, and their land was folded into its borders. The world called it a war. The Palestinians called it the catastrophe.
From that moment, the balance was broken. One side gained a country, an army, and international recognition. The other was left with refugee camps, memory, and a hope that has been shrinking ever since.
There has never been true balance in this land, neither in power nor in the ability to shape one’s own future. After 1948, Israel emerged as a nation with borders, laws, and the protection of allies. Palestinians, by contrast, were left scattered across refugee camps and occupied territories, living under the authority of the same state that displaced them. What began as one people’s war for independence became another’s long and quiet subjugation.
Today that imbalance defines every aspect of daily life. Israel controls the borders, the airspace, and the movement of goods and people. It decides who may build, who may leave, and who may return. In the West Bank, military checkpoints carve through ordinary routines such as trips to school or hospital visits, harvests delayed for inspections that never end. Gaza remains sealed from the world, its economy throttled, its people confined to a narrow strip of coast that can be entered or exited only with permission from the very power that encloses it.
Even the law is divided. Israeli settlers in the West Bank live under civil courts; their Palestinian neighbors fall under military rule. Two populations share the same hillsides, but only one holds legal recourse. This dual system, invisible to those who benefit from it, governs not only land but psychology. It teaches who may expect justice and who must hope for it.
When violence erupts, the disparity widens further. Israel’s airstrikes are defended as strategic and precise, while Palestinian rockets, crude and often tragic, are cast as proof of barbarism. Both destroy lives, yet only one is granted legitimacy. In the language of headlines, Israel acts while Palestinians react. Israel defends, Palestinians provoke. Power even decides which deaths the world is allowed to mourn.
The imbalance runs deeper than policy or weaponry; it has become existential. One side wakes each morning within the assurances of sovereignty, the other beneath the weight of occupation. For Israelis, security means stability and choice. For Palestinians, it has come to mean endurance. And when endurance finally breaks into resistance, the world too often mistakes it for hatred rather than grief.
Every generation born under occupation inherits a kind of exhaustion that words cannot quite hold. Children in Gaza grow up learning the sound of drones before they learn the geography of their own city. In the West Bank, a daily commute might include an hour of waiting at a checkpoint, a search, a question that has no safe answer. Parents measure safety not by distance from danger but by how long the ceasefire lasts. Over time, survival itself becomes the rhythm of life.
When people live without control over their movement, land, or future, resistance takes many shapes. Sometimes it looks like protest or defiance; other times it looks like despair. The acts that the world sees as eruptions of violence are often the breaking point of that endurance, the moment when years of containment finally spill over. This does not excuse brutality, but it reminds us that violence cannot be understood apart from the conditions that create it.
For Israel, violence is woven into a system that claims to maintain order. For Palestinians, it is sporadic and desperate, a response to a structure that offers no peaceful exit. One side fights to preserve what it already controls; the other fights simply to exist. The difference between those motives is the space where empathy tends to vanish.
Each new cycle of bloodshed begins with an act and a counter-act, but the ledger never resets. Every demolished home, every lost child, every humiliation at a border post accumulates, pressing down on the collective memory until grief becomes identity. And yet, within that grief, people continue to build, to teach, to marry, to plant gardens beside concrete walls. It is not defiance so much as an insistence on being human in a place designed to forget humanity.
From a distance, it can be easy to mistake empathy for allegiance. In the United States, those who stand in the streets calling for a ceasefire are often accused of siding with extremists, as if compassion for Palestinian lives requires contempt for Israeli ones. But that is not what drives these voices. Most who protest are not choosing a side in a war; they are choosing a side in humanity. They are refusing the logic that says some lives are expendable when power demands it.
For many of us, the scenes from Gaza stir something deeply familiar, the recognition of state violence defended as order, of a narrative that privileges the strong and blames the weak for their own suffering. The banners and marches are not declarations of hatred but of grief. They are reminders that empathy is not a finite resource; it does not run out when offered to those whom headlines have already condemned.
To reject genocide is not to reject Israel. It is to reject the belief that safety for one people must come through the dehumanization of another. Justice is not a partisan idea; it is a moral instinct, one that transcends borders and politics. When Americans speak out against the destruction of Gaza, they are not cheering for rockets or militants; they are mourning for the children who never had a chance to become anything else.
To protest this imbalance is to affirm a principle as old as conscience itself, that equality is indivisible. You cannot demand it for some and deny it to others. True security will never be built on domination; it can only exist where dignity is shared.
In refugee camps across Lebanon and Jordan, families still keep the keys to houses that no longer exist. The metal has darkened with time, the teeth worn smooth, but each one remains a small declaration that a life once unfolded behind that door. For the children who inherit them, the keys are not symbols of revenge; they are reminders that belonging should never have to be defended at gunpoint.
Seventy-five years after the first families walked away from their homes, the pattern continues. New ruins replace the old. The same words—security, retaliation, self-defense—circle endlessly while the graves continue to rise. Yet beneath the dust and slogans, the truth is disarmingly simple: no people should have to earn their right to live free of fear.
History has a way of testing our capacity for empathy. It asks whether we can see beyond allegiance and recognize the human cost of our indifference. To stand with the oppressed is not to stand against anyone; it is to insist that dignity cannot belong to one people alone.
Justice is not anti-Israel. It is anti-erasure.
And when the shouting fades and the screens go dark, that is what remains, the quiet conviction that equality, once extended to everyone, diminishes no one.
Thank you for reading. If you would like to explore more in-depth content, I invite you to check out my book, "Wander Light: Notes on Carrying Less and Seeing More." It helps support this web page and enables me to continue providing you with more content. Get your copy here.