(DAVID BEN GURION AND YITZHAK BEN ZVI (R) AS LAW STUDENTS IN TURKEY, 1912)

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This is a topic that has been widely covered by the media and has sparked intense emotions and reactions from different perspectives.

When I criticized what Hamas did of crimes against civilians on October 7, most of my family and friends did not like this and considered me biased not only against Hamas, but against the Palestinians, and when I criticized the crimes committed by Israel against civilians (taking into account the huge difference in power between Hamas and Israel) this did not please my Jewish, American and some Christian friends who considered me biased against Israel and sympathetic to Hamas.

I noticed that in recent years there has been a global polarization- if you are not with me then you are against me and sometimes you are the enemy. So in America, if your affiliation is to the Republican Party, the Democratic Party becomes a traitorous party to the point that a friend of mine, a right-wing Republican, gave me a book entitled (Why Democrats Hate America) and told me that a second American civil war is better than the rule of the Democrats!! The opposite also is true if you supported former President Donald Trump and objected to the attempts of the current Democratic government to fabricate trials for him to prevent him from running for the presidential elections in 2024, you will be accused of racism. I have American friends who only watch the right-wing channel (Fox News) and repeat to me what they watch on that channel, and there are also friends who can’t stand Fox News and watch other left-wing channels that support the Democratic Party and repeat what they hear on those channels. and there are many Arabs who only watch Al Jazeera and say “I saw this on Al Jazeera” as if it is a fact.

In recent years there has been another kind of polarization, which is the polarization of social media platforms where you only listen to those who agree with your vision. There are groups that consider President Trump to be the best president in American history and others who consider him the worst president in American history and America seems to be completely divided 50/50 on this matter. I found this division also in Egypt where some people consider President Sisi to be the best president for Egypt in the last half century and they only watch satellite channels or social media sites that confirm their vision while others consider him the worst and they only watch channels that have nothing to do but attack Sisi.

All this happens as if people have lost their minds and lost the ability to distinguish between truth and half-truth and propaganda. God gave us the mind for a main purpose, which is to distinguish and use it like a filter to purify the impurities around us, and the danger is that this polarization leads mostly to hatred and hatred may lead in many cases to violence. And we have seen in recent days that because of the Gaza war, some Jews and Muslims around the world have been attacked, whether verbally or physically, and things even reached the point of killing innocents.

The war currently raging in Gaza is getting media coverage that I have never seen in my life. We watch live the destruction, suffering and victims, and each side in the war presents you with only half the truth and sometimes presents you with completely fabricated news. The hatred that this war generates now will see in the future an extremism that we have not witnessed before in the Middle East, as voices of revenge will rise and voices of coexistence and peace will disappear. and more extremists will jump to the scene, whether from the Israeli right or from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and both Jews and Muslims believe in “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” and this will create a hellish vicious circle of revenge and retaliation and counter-revenge.

The unfortunate thing is that Netanyahu, who leads the extreme right in Israel, not only does not believe in peace but also does not believe in the Torah, which says in three places (Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus) that it is (an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth…. etc.). He believes in ten Palestinian eyes for one Israeli eye and ten Palestinian teeth for one Israeli tooth, and the number of ten Palestinians for one Israeli is subject to increase according to the statistics of previous wars of the loss of Palestinian lives versus Israeli lives…. Believe me:  an eye for an eye will make us all blind, and there is no way out of the hellish circle of hatred except by adopting the principle of love, accepting the other, rejecting selfishness and hatred. The earth is enough for everyone. We want to build the future for our children instead of building mass graves.

You can also read the Arabic original here: