Agony in Israel, Gaza Shows Our Deep Interdependence—In Ground Wars and Climate Crisis

It’s been such a horrific week, with so many of us raging, grieving, and struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible: Hamas’ brutal massacres in Israel, and now the soaring toll of death, displacement, and destruction raining down on people in Gaza.

As news channels scroll and the rest of us doomscroll through an endless loop of suffering on both sides of the line, the only way to understand this roiling, massing catastrophe is to bring our own common humanity to the conversation, one day at a time. And set that same expectation for anyone making life-and-death decisions about what happens next.

Even on days when that feels hopelessly naïve and unrealistic.

The alternative to asserting this bedrock principle is the horror that unfolded last week at kibbutzim and a techno music festival in Israel, and the murderous misery now playing out for people in a crowded, blockaded, fully besieged enclave described as an open-air prison in a 2022 review by Human Rights Watch.

The alternative, need it even be said, is no alternative at all.

There’s more to this story here…including the implications of endless war over territory that is already becoming unliveable due to climate change.