Never Again, For Anyone

Turning wounds into wisdom, for ourselves and our world.

How do we stay human after Gaza?

It’s not an abstract question. It’s the question that confronts us every time we watch the news and see children buried in rubble, every time we hear “never again” used to justify another round of destruction, every time we recognize how trauma passed down through generations can become a weapon instead of a warning.

This piece begins in scripture, with Amos and Micah crying out against a people who confuse sacrifice with justice, nationalism with God. It grapples with the texts of conquest that have been used to sanctify genocide, and with the terrible ways trauma, like the kind the formed during the Holocaust and the Nakba, can echo forward when it’s never healed.

But it doesn’t stop there. It asks us to face the distortion of “self-defense” as a shield for empire, to hold memory without repeating its violence, and to imagine what “never again” might mean if it really applied to everyone.

The question isn’t only about Gaza or Israel. It’s about us, whether we will let fear and tribal wounds drive the future, or whether we will risk the kind of solidarity that makes us human.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

Imagine a place reduced to ash and rubble. The air hangs with a metallic haze, sharp with smoke and the sourness of fear.

Parents cradle children whose eyes are open but unseeing. Emaciated limbs and hollow cheeks reveal bodies ravaged by starvation, both young and old withering beneath systematic hunger.

A long column of the displaced winds down a broken road. They push carts, drag bundles, carry faded photographs of the lost.

Those who survive move like ghosts through the ruins of what was once home. An elderly person sits among the fragments of a collapsed building, fingers tracing the edge of a broken picture frame, the only remnant of decades of memories. Nearby, a young parent boils scavenged scraps over a makeshift fire, children watching with hollow eyes that have aged decades in weeks.

At night, they huddle in shelters meant for hundreds but packed with thousands. The air is thick with the mingled breath of strangers now bound by a single shared truth: everything they knew exists only in memory now. The local shops. The schoolyard. The gardens. The gathering places. Their grief is not just for the dead, but for the death of normalcy itself, for mornings without terror, for the luxury of planning beyond the next meal or the next moment of safety.

This is what remains when a community is unmade. Not just broken buildings, but broken time. The continuity of generations snapped, ancestral homes rendered unrecognizable, family traditions and bedtime stories silenced mid-telling.

Am I talking about the life of Jews in 1945 Germany? Or Palestinians in 2025 Gaza?

If the scene blurs in your mind, it is because the human heart knows: grief is grief, and the ruins all smell the same.

The Cycle of Propaganda

What has allowed us to come to this… again? A world where the very people one regime attempted to exterminate are now seeking to exterminate another? A country that once went to war to stop the exterminators now sending the bombs used for extermination.

We have seen this pattern before. The progression of persecution. It did not begin with gas chambers; it began with words.

Hitler's campaign against the Jewish people did not emerge from nowhere. It built upon centuries of European antisemitism. He weaponized existing prejudice, blending medieval religious antagonism with the pseudoscientific racial theories of the 19th century. His ideology positioned Jews as both a biological threat and the invisible puppet masters behind opposing forces, communism and capitalism alike.

When economic devastation crushed Germany after World War I, Hitler found fertile ground for scapegoating. He channeled public desperation toward a visible minority, transforming ancient prejudices into systematic dehumanization. The Holocaust did not happen because Hitler had logical reasons. It happened because a society allowed moral judgment to be surrendered to authoritarian ideology.

This pattern of dehumanization and scapegoating echoes today. We see it in the abuse of ancient texts, the propaganda of false narratives, possible blackmail, and the choice to let trauma echo through generations rather than doing the hard work of breaking its resonance. So let us explore each of these and see if, somehow, in the midst of the heartbreak and rubble, we can find a way to stay human.

Understanding Sacred Texts

When it comes to ancient texts, we need to explore their interpretation twice: first using only the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, and a second time using the entire Christian Bible.

But before we dive into analysis of detailed and specific passages, we need to offer a wide view of what the Bible is and how to think about it as a holy text.

When I speak of the Bible, I am not talking about a weapon to win arguments or a rulebook dropped from the sky. I am talking about a library of voices, gathered over centuries, telling the story of a people wrestling with God, themselves, and the world around them. It is poetry and prophecy, law code and lament, parable and protest. Every word was born in a particular place, shaped by the hopes and fears, the customs and language of its time. To honor it, we have to read it the way it was written: aware of its history, alive to its genres, and careful to notice when it is prescribing how life should be and when it is simply describing the struggle of a moment.

And like our Jewish brothers and sisters, who engaged in the practice of midrash, we do not come to the text just to get the right answer. We come to wrestle, to ask questions, to let its ancient stories challenge our modern assumptions and to let our modern questions press back. At its deepest, the Bible is a witness to a relentless love that keeps showing up in the mess, keeps pulling humanity toward justice, mercy, and wholeness. Read this way, it is not a dead archive but a living conversation, shaping us into a people who can stay human in a world that all too easily forgets how.

This framework becomes a tool we can use to help us understand what in the text itself is from God and what is from humanity struggling with their own desires and fears in the midst of the divine invitation. If it is rooted in love, embrace, healing, health, wholeness, redemption, and restoration, then we can confidently assume it comes from or is inspired by the divine voice. But if it is not, its roots lie elsewhere and it needs to be seen, not as divine command, but as something flowing from our struggle to stay human.

The Weaponization of the Hebrew Bible

With that framework established, let us consider Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu first invoked the language of Amalek regarding Palestine during his rise to political prominence in the 1990s. His rhetoric intensified after becoming Prime Minister, particularly during periods of heightened conflict. The biblical story of Amalek, where in Deuteronomy God commands the Israelites to "blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven," became a dangerous theological framework that Netanyahu and other hardline Israeli politicians have employed.

In 2009, after assuming office for his second term, Netanyahu began more explicitly linking Palestinian resistance to existential threats facing Israel, sometimes drawing indirect parallels to the Amalekites. However, it was during the 2014 Gaza War that his rhetoric became more overtly apocalyptic, framing Hamas as an uncompromising enemy that must be completely eliminated, even as reports suggest that his government had allowed Qatari funding to flow to Hamas, complicating the path toward a unified Palestinian government and a two-state solution.

The most explicit and controversial invocation came in October 2023, when Netanyahu referenced 1 Samuel 15:3 regarding the military campaign in Gaza: "Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses." This statement shocked many observers, as it seemed to advocate for indiscriminate violence against civilians.

This framing represents a profound theological distortion that transforms a contextual ancient text into contemporary policy justification. By casting Palestinians as Amalekites, eternal enemies to be destroyed, Netanyahu constructed a narrative that makes peace impossible and violence inevitable.

Scripture in Context

But even if stripping an ancient text from its context and slapping it down as a framework for contemporary policy were somehow acceptable, what is the context of this text, and what does the rest of the Hebrew Bible have to say about Israel's neighbors?

The command to wipe out Amalek, men, women, children, even animals, is terrifying. It is the kind of passage that makes us shudder because, in its own time, it was understood as God's will. But to read it faithfully, we have to remember the world it came from: an ancient tribal landscape where survival often meant eliminating the other before they eliminated you. This was not the voice of a serene and universal ethic; it was the voice of a people speaking from the limits of their moral horizon.

So while humans, limited in their understanding, attribute genocide to divine instruction, the broader story points us to something else. Isaiah envisions swords beaten into plowshares. Micah calls people to justice, mercy, and humility. Zechariah pictures children playing safely in the streets.

The Call to Hospitality

And it is not just future texts that call for movement from fear-based security to hospitality-based security, as if God started off vengeful and became more generous over time. In Israel's own story of formation, God rescues them not to be another global power, but to be a nation that models a different way of being in the world, a nation that witnesses that relentless love and hospitality to all nations. As part of this, the people of Israel are told in Exodus 22, "Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt."

This is not a minor rule buried in a litany of commands. It appears more than thirty times throughout the Hebrew Bible. Both the Canaanite prostitute Rahab and the Moabite Ruth are foreigners who find themselves in the lineage of David, Israel's greatest king who, at times, managed to sync his heartbeat with God's. The message is unmistakable: Israel's liberation from Egypt was not just freedom from oppression, it was freedom for purpose. God did not save them so they could become oppressors, but to create a society that reveals what divine justice looks like in human community.

The story of Exodus does not end with escape; it moves toward covenant. It envisions a community where the orphan, widow, and the foreigner find protection precisely because Israel remembers what it was like to be vulnerable.

So even in its own day, the call for the destruction of Amalek was not security. It was amnesia, a forgetting of who Israel was called to be in the world. It was a surrender of their covenant identity, rooted in hospitality to the stranger and justice for the vulnerable.

The Theological Roots of American Support for Israel

Here in the United States, our own theological amnesia feeds the same cycle but uses both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. Much of America's unwavering support for Israel is not rooted in a clear pursuit of justice or peace. It comes from a 19th century invention by John Nelson Darby called premillennial dispensationalism. Darby divided history into distinct "dispensations" and read the Bible like a coded blueprint for the end of the world. In his system, God's promises to Israel had to be fulfilled in literal, geopolitical terms before Jesus could return. Modern statecraft became prophecy. Military conquest became divine mandate.

How Dispensationalism Entered American Christianity

Darby's ideas crossed the Atlantic through prophecy conferences and revival meetings, but they became part of America's religious bloodstream with the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. Scofield's notes placed Darby's interpretations right alongside the biblical text, making them feel inseparable from Scripture. Bible institutes, seminaries, and later bestselling books like The Late Great Planet Earth and Left Behind turned this into a cultural reflex: supporting modern Israel was not just foreign policy, it was obedience to God, something Senator Ted Cruz recently said explicitly on an interview with Tucker Carlson and Lindsay Graham declared from the floor of the Senate..

The Distortion of Biblical Teaching

But like the call to genocide, this theology ignores the Bible's own invitation for society to move from tribal nationalism toward a global community of love and justice. It flattens prophetic poetry into war maps and turns the God of creation into a cosmic real estate broker. By tying God's faithfulness to borders and bombs instead of mercy and welcome, it baptizes violence in the name of hope. And when that theology drives voters and policymakers, it shapes a world where peace is impossible and war inevitable.

Ironically, it is a theology that obsesses over the coming of the anti-Christ while simultaneously being, at its core, anti-Christ.

When we twist sacred texts into weapons, we turn living water into dust. The words meant to breathe life become tombstones marking where compassion was buried. But beneath even the most parched ground, springs of mercy wait to rise again. While we, whether we is ancient Israel or present day Christianity often abandon our calling, the divine voice remains faithful and the invitation to another way keeps coming.

Historical Distortions and Present Realities

But while a faithful reading of the Bible offers no legitimate grounds for what we see happening in Gaza, that is only one justification for what we see happening in Gaza. The present too brims with lies and propaganda that make such violence possible. Just as ancient Israel sometimes lived as if every Canaanite, Amalekite, or Moabite existed solely to destroy them, modern Israel functions as if every Palestinian is an existential threat. And with that fear as the operating lens, history gets rewritten.

Formation and Displacement

After World War II, the horror of the Holocaust created a global will to provide Jews with a secure homeland. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. This was done without the consent of the Palestinian people, who at the time were the overwhelming majority in the land.

In 1948, as the State of Israel declared its independence, more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in what became known as the Nakba, or "catastrophe." Families fled with what they could carry: a sewing machine lashed to a cart, a pot still warm from breakfast, a tin of family photographs tucked into a coat pocket. Villages were emptied, wells filled with rubble, olive groves left untended as their keepers walked into exile. The key to the front door, now useless, became a talisman passed down to children born in refugee camps.

Expansion and Occupation

In the years that followed, Israel consolidated control over the territory granted by the UN plan and expanded beyond it through military victories and settlement building. The Six-Day War of 1967 brought the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, placing millions of Palestinians under Israeli military rule. Checkpoints sprouted along village roads. Barbed wire sliced through farmland. Bulldozers flattened homes in the night, leaving families shivering under the open sky.

The Blockade of Gaza

Over the decades, policies of land confiscation, settlement expansion, and movement restriction became everyday reality. Gaza, in particular, has been under a suffocating blockade since 2007. Its borders are tightly controlled by Israel, its economy strangled, and its two million residents trapped in one of the most densely populated strips of land on earth. Fishermen who once cast their nets into the Mediterranean are now fired upon if they venture beyond a narrow boundary. Students accepted into foreign universities are barred from leaving. Medical supplies are rationed until the hospitals run short, and the hum of generators is the sound of survival. Israeli politicians talk opening about sending troops into Gaza to "mow the lawn" or cutting down on nutrition to put the population on a diet.

Gaza has become a place where the sea whispers of freedom just beyond reach. Children draw birds on classroom walls and imagine what it means to fly without borders. Their dreams are wings beating against invisible barriers, persistent as waves reshaping stone.

The False Narrative

This is the soil in which the modern narrative is planted. The old Zionist slogan of "a land without a people for a people without a land" is revived, ignoring centuries of Palestinian life, culture, and care for the land. The Nakba is erased from public memory or justified as a necessary birth pang. Decades of systemic dispossession and occupation are reframed as defensive necessity. And in a tragic irony, these policies have helped create the very resistance they are meant to suppress.

History shows that when there is genuine progress toward a two-state solution, acts of violence by Palestinians decrease. What is often labeled as unprovoked aggression is, in reality, the desperate resistance of a people fighting to protect their humanity, while the Zionist project seeks not survival but dominance. This means Israel's actions are not about self-defense, but stirring up resistance only to justify snuffing it out.

America's Own Colonial History

That said, calling for such truth telling is challenging for America because when we insist Israel tells the truth about claiming land by force, it is not just their history that comes into focus, it is ours.

We, too, are a nation built on land taken from Native peoples through war, forced removal, and broken treaties. We even took things a step further, building our cities and wealth through the labor of people stolen from their homelands, chained in ships, and made to work under the lash. To stand for justice abroad without facing the injustice in our own story is to split ourselves in two, to speak with one voice about human dignity while silencing the other. The work of truth-telling is not punishment, it is liberation … for Israel, for Palestine, and for us. Without it, justice remains selective, and peace remains impossible.

Economic and Geopolitical Interests

And this truth telling extends beyond our past and into our present. A web of economic and geopolitical interests further entrench the United States in this conflict. The military-industrial complex profits from perpetual warfare through arms sales. Regional power dynamics and resource considerations shape alliances. These material forces, as much as distorted biblical interpretation, drive American complicity in Palestinian suffering. By acknowledging these systemic interests, we can better understand why peace remains elusive despite decades of supposed diplomatic efforts.

The Shadow of Compromise

Amid all of this, there is another layer that must be named. Not all resistance to truth is theological or historical. Some of it is personal and deeply compromised. We know that during the Clinton years, Netanyahu reportedly tried to leverage still secret Monica Lewinsky affair to shape peace negotiations. We now have credible reporting that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset. If that is true, then the possibility exists that U.S. foreign policy is not only shaped by bad theology and political alliance rooted in mutual dishonesty, but also by the fear of what might come to light. When leaders govern in the shadow of blackmail, truth-telling becomes more than a moral challenge, it becomes a threat to their own survival.

But beneath these abuses of holy texts, the rewriting of history to serve our ends, cosplaying diplomacy as a cover for the pursuit of economic and geopolitical power, and operating from the fear of what might be made known, something else dwells. There is a common root to everything we see on the surface, everything I've discussed so far. Unaddressed trauma.

The Architecture of Trauma

Like a tree whose roots have grown around buried stones, nations shape themselves around unhealed trauma. The stones don't disappear; they become part of the structure. But when storms come, it's these rigid places that crack first, threatening the whole system.

Trauma lives in the body like frost in winter soil. It changes what can grow there. It alters the landscape of possibility. But even the deepest freeze gives way to spring's patient warming. The land remembers how to bloom, even after seasons of barrenness.

The Holocaust carved a wound into the Jewish soul. Six million murdered. Generations haunted by absence. That wound has not healed by pretending it is gone. In its rawness, memory can mutate into mirror, and the oppressed of yesterday, terrified of being powerless again, can become the oppressor of today.

The Path to Healing

Trauma works like drought-hardened ground. The first rains don't penetrate; they run off in violent floods. Only with gentle, persistent moisture does the soil soften enough to receive what it needs. Our truth-telling must be this kind of steady rain, consistent enough to soften defenses, gentle enough not to trigger more flooding.

When nations build walls around their fear, they don't just keep others out; they lock themselves in with their nightmares. True security has never come from higher barriers but from wider tables.

This dynamic is further complicated by how intergenerational trauma shapes both communities. The Holocaust's wound in Jewish consciousness coexists with Palestinian trauma from decades of displacement and occupation. These parallel narratives of existential threat feed cycles of violence, with each community's pain becoming invisible to the other. Breaking this cycle requires acknowledging both stories, not equalizing them, but recognizing how they interact in ways that perpetuate suffering.

Responsibility and Restoration

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Some are guilty, but all are responsible." Responsibility means breaking the cycle before the next turn of the wheel, so that "never again" means never again for anyone.

Healing trauma is not weakness. It is the most courageous form of security we can build. It means facing the wound without letting it dictate vengeance. It means turning "Never Again" into a covenant that binds us to protect not just our own children, but the children of those we once feared.

We are called to become gardeners of a more tender world, one where we plant not just for our own harvest but for those who will gather long after we are gone. Our hands in this soil is both prayer and promise, that from the compost of our collective suffering, new life will emerge.

Personal Transformation as the Foundation

More often than not, collective healing begins with personal transformation. As we face these deeply entrenched cycles of violence and retaliation, we often feel powerless in the face of global forces beyond our control. Yet our capacity to contribute to wider healing depends first on our willingness to examine our own wounds and defensive patterns. When we avoid our personal pain, we perpetuate it, both within ourselves and in how we engage with the wider world.

The microcosm reflects the macrocosm. The same dynamics that drive nations to justify violence rather than face vulnerability also operate within our intimate relationships, our families, and our communities. By confronting our own histories with courage and compassion, we develop the emotional muscles needed to hold space for larger, more complex conflicts.

This journey from personal to collective healing isn't linear but spiral-shaped, each turn bringing us back to familiar territory with new perspective. Like water that gradually reshapes stone, our individual healing work creates channels through which larger currents of transformation can flow.

Finding Agency Through Self-Reflection

This truth-telling is not just theoretical for me. When my first marriage ended, I crafted a narrative where my behaviors were simply reactions to my context, to life in relationship with her. I was the wounded one, responding to circumstances beyond my control. But when I remarried someone entirely different and found the same patterns emerging within me, that comfortable story crumbled. The common denominator was me … not my circumstances, not my partner. The defensive weeds I'd cultivated were growing from soil depleted by my own unexamined trauma.

This recognition was the beginning of my healing. Not because it assigned blame, but because it restored agency. If the problem was only external, I was powerless. But if some of it lived within me, I could begin the work of transformation. Nations follow this same pattern. When we locate all danger outside our borders, we remain trapped in cycles of violence. True security begins with the courage to examine what we carry within.

Clarity Through Inner Work

When we develop the courage to examine our own wounds, something transformative happens to our perception. Like cleaning a foggy window, internal honesty improves external vision. We begin to see the world not through the distorted lens of our defenses, but with the clarity that comes from self-knowledge. The patterns we've recognized within ourselves become visible in larger systems, not as judgment but as recognition.

This clarity doesn't make the work easier, but it makes it possible. When we've faced our own complicity in harmful patterns, we develop a compassion that extends beyond our comfort zones. We're less likely to demand perfection before offering solidarity, less tempted by the false comfort of certainty. The humility born from honest self-examination becomes the foundation for genuine connection across difference.

As we practice this internal work, we develop muscles for sitting with discomfort rather than fleeing from it. This capacity becomes crucial when confronting collective trauma and injustice. We can hold space for truth without fragmenting under its weight. We can remain present with suffering without needing to fix, explain away, or avenge it. We become vessels capable of carrying both grief and possibility, both memory and vision.

Authentic Presence in Action

From this grounded place, our actions in the world gain both potency and gentleness. We're no longer driven by unconscious fear or the need to prove our righteousness. Instead, we move with the wisdom of the wounded healer, offering not perfect solutions but authentic presence. This is how transformation ripples outward, not from grand gestures born of guilt or bravado, but from small, consistent acts of truth-telling that flow from a heart no longer afraid of its own depths.

This is where the work turns toward all of us. Truth-telling and trauma-healing are not only national projects. They are personal disciplines. Like a permaculture system, we must recognize that our defensive weeds of denial grow from soil depleted by trauma. These protections once kept us alive, but now block the light. By restoring safety and nourishment to our emotional ecosystem, we create conditions where truth can thrive alongside vulnerability. Only when we heal these living systems within ourselves can we cultivate communities where peace is not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.

Ecological Wisdom for Social Healing

After forest fires, the first plants to emerge are not the ancient trees, but the quick-growing pioneers that prepare the soil for what comes next. Personal and collective healing follows this same wisdom. What grows first in the burned places is not the final form, but the necessary beginning.

Beneath the surface of healthy forests runs a communication network of fungal threads, connecting trees in ways invisible above ground. Likewise, beneath our human conflicts lie threads of shared vulnerability and need. When we nourish these connections, the whole system grows more resilient. This is how we move forward. Not by forgetting the past, but by remembering it differently, by allowing our stories to nourish rather than divide us as we move forward, implementing practical frameworks for accountability and repair.

Community truth commissions where stories can be told and heard, reparations for displacement that acknowledge material losses, and dismantling of apartheid structures that perpetuate inequality. Like forest restoration after fire, healing these deep wounds requires both quick-growing pioneers and slow-growing, deep-rooted species. The work begins with acknowledging harm but must grow into systems that honor the dignity and safety of all who call this planet home.

It's not easy, but if we are going to stay human, this work is essential.

Practices For Truth-Telling

Here are three practices to help you engage in the kind of truth telling that will move us towards healing both individually and collectively. Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation reflection, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, I have something for you.