“Santa Claus do you ever come to the ghetto.? Santa Claus Do you wonder why we suffer so. Santa Claus when will you come to the ghetto…where are the presents that you brought for us” sings Carlene Davis in one of the more popular Christmas songs in Jamaica ( No! Forget about Maria Carey’s and Nat King Cole’s Christmas songs for the time being). It’s a pertinent question at one level, and a spiritual commentary at another level, which explains fully why Israel and Hamas are at war over land, and why there is much tempered joy over the freeing of Israeli hostages and Palestinian “criminals “yesterday. And why consistently over many years in excess of 1000 murders have been committed in Jamaica land we love, and a land we have come to dread at times.

This as the greatest evil that has been committed in the name of Jesus is the Santa Clausation ( making up a word for this egregious act of idolatry) of the Incarnation – God becoming man. A question posed, more a soliloquy or musing, than question, many centuries ago by the wisest man who ever lived, King Solomon.

““But will God really dwell on earth with humans? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!”

2 Chronicles 6:18 NIV

A Word from way back, long before Whoppy kill Fillup as we say in Jamaica, and a Prophetic Word about Jesus, the God-man, coming on earth, to save us from our sins ( murder and idolatry and extortion and sexual immorality and pride and anger and “ bad mind”, and every evil you can imagine, including loving dance hall music – Kilometer – more than hymns – In times like these you need a Savior). And whose birthday celebrations have been captured and marketed for profit and not for the “Prophet”, that it was meant to be. So how do we locate Hamas and Israel and their cousins “Contract Killers in Ja” in all of this assault on the Christmas message.

Listen again to the same Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived:

““When your people Israel have been defeated by an enemy because they have sinned against you and when they turn back and give praise to your name, praying and making supplication before you in this temple, then hear from heaven and forgive the sin of your people Israel and bring them back to the land you gave to them and their ancestors.”

2 Chronicles 6:24-25 NIV

And the prayer before this one:

“Yet, Lord my God, give attention to your servant’s prayer and his plea for mercy. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence. May your eyes be open toward this temple day and night, this place of which you said you would put your Name there. May you hear the prayer your servant prays toward this place. Hear the supplications of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place. Hear from heaven, your dwelling place; and when you hear, forgive.”

2 Chronicles 6:19-21 NIV

The face of grief in Gaza

The cause of grief in Israel and what provoked the current war

The challenge we face in Jamaica, and that which Israel faces in the Middle East, is that the response ordained by God then, and now, in and through Jesus Christ, who lives in us the baptized ones, as the temple of God by faith and by grace, when evil has descended on us because we have sinned ( and all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God…ask any Jamaican about this Scripture) is not to seek to annihilate those who attack us, but to repent and seek the forgiveness of this God of mercy. The God who in spite of the fact that heaven and earth cannot contain him, in His mercy, in the fullness of time, decided to “ dwell amongst sinful mankind “ in Jesus Christ. The author and perfecter of our faith! And the One who has in His heart a special concern for those who live in the ghetto. Those who are marginalized by the powerful and the pompous, the uncaring and those who seek to make a profit out of the birthday of Christ. The same ones, and of the same profiteering spirit who benefited from slavery in the 18th century and the same spirit which seeks to “ enslave “ the people of Gaza- for whatever reason, including allegedly security reasons. This instead of being obedient to their most famous Prophet John the Baptist, whose father prophesied in a song termed The Benedictus, that he John, and by extension the people of Israel who would come to know Christ, that the mighty salvation that Christ offer has many benefits. Including :

“To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, And to remember his holy covenant; The oath which he sware to our father Abraham, That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies Might serve him without fear, In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.”

Luke 1:72-75 KJV

And not only to live without fear but also to:

“And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; To give knowledge of salvation unto his people By the remission of their sins,”

Luke 1:76-77 KJV

How wonderful, how beautiful it would have been if Israel had celebrated Christmas over 2000 years ago, instead of still waiting for a “war lord “ Messiah. Celebrated the One who gave them orders to “ give knowledge of salvation to the people of Gaza”. How wonderful, how beautiful it would have been for Jamaica, if we had continued the practice and belief of our slave forbears, who trusted in God and Puppa Jesus. And thus celebrated Christmas in a land which was largely free of the kind of ghetto living and its consequences which plague us today. Murder most foul, extortion and the like. And all kinds of wickedness coming not necessarily from the physical ghetto, but from hearts out of which flow all kinds of evil, whether in the salubrious climes of the uptown neighborhoods or in Etana’s famed #wrongaddresses

All because Santa Claus and what he represents ( Walmart and Amazon) has captured their hearts and minds and souls, and not the God-man who has come that we may have life and have life more abundantly, than what Black Friday shopping offers. And Lotto! And the Prosperity Train and the Prosperity Gospel. Mercy God. Have mercy on us. And forgive our sinful souls for choosing what we should like over Who we should love.

I wasn’t quite sure if I should have gone work, yesterday. This, as I have a one hour commute going west. Going right into the midst of the tropical depression/storm that enveloped the island yesterday, and produced so much rain and floods and made the lives of so many people miserable. And in some cases angry! Very angry with their neighbors, as shown on TV last night, for throwing garbage into the river which inevitably resulted in blocking up the flow under the bridge, in that community, and causing water to flood people’s homes. Again!

Thank God for the highway, with confidence, I was able to drive fairly safely, at a reduced speed, while others flashed pass me – rushing to where, only God He knows – to work and safely back home, before the rains really became very heavy in the late evening. And so the dominant theme for my life, as I read and watched a sermon this week on thanksgiving to God, came home very vividly. In all things give God thanks and praise! This as ingratitude to God, according to the preacher, is one of the dominant features of human behavior in this age. He was addressing an American audience, which included my daughter and her family, but he could very well have been speaking, quite rightly so, to us here in Jamaica.

And in the midst of all of this reflection and giving thanks, in the midst of the storms of life, literally and metaphorically, my neighbor died. He was not only my neighbor “ on the streets where we lived”, ( My Fair Lady) but my schoolmate. We both went to Jamaica College; he was my junior by one year. Real neighbor! My wife used to walk with he and his wife in the evenings at one time, while I did my exercises in the mornings. More importantly, thank God for Jesus, he was my church brother at Saint Andrew ( Anglican ) Parish Church. And a faithful member he was. To the very end! So although Robert Martin gained some fame for coaching one of Jamaica’s top sprinters in the early days, Everard Samuels of STATS, and no doubt excelled in his professional endeavors, at the end of the day, for him, because he gave thanks to God for his salvation, eternal life is assured. Which of course raises the question, for my former schools mates at Jamaica College, a school which produced three heads of state and a leader of the parliamentary opposition, two of whom were my contemporaries and remain friends, and all of mankind, what is life all about? And not just an issue to be considered at the end of life, or in the midst of the storms of life which threaten in one way or another, but from the very beginning. “ Tell the children the truth” said Bob Marley famously. To answer the question I am led to share what I read last night before praying – placing myself and family and neighbors and others in God’s hands, and then going to bed. #latenightdevotions

NOVEMBER 17

OAWALD CHAMBERS

The Eternal Goal

By Myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this thing…I will bless you…

GENESIS 22:16-17

Abraham, at this point, has reached where he is in touch with the very nature of God. He now understands the reality of God.

My goal is God Himself…
At any cost, dear Lord, by any road.

“At any cost…by any road” means submitting to God’s way of bringing us to the goal.

There is no possibility of questioning God when He speaks, if He speaks to His own nature in me. Prompt obedience is the only result. When Jesus says, “Come,” I simply come; when He says, “Let go,” I let go; when He says, “Trust God in this matter,” I trust. This work of obedience is the evidence that the nature of God is in me.

God’s revelation of Himself to me is influenced by my character, not by God’s character.

’Tis because I am ordinary,
Thy ways so often look ordinary to me.

And this also from one of the famous preachers of our age. A. Z Tozer from his book, “ The Pursuit God”.

“ Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which briefly stated means this: that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man. Before a sinful man can think a right thought of God, there must have been a work of enlightenment done within him; imperfect is may be, but a true work nonetheless, and the secret cause of all desiring and seeking and praying which may follow. We pursue God only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit. “ No man can come to me” said our Lord, “ except the Father which hath sent me draw him, and it by this prevenient drawing that God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming.

Thank God for Jesus Bob Martin responded to the prevenient grace of God which comes to all mankind from the Cross of Calvary:

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.””

John 12:32 NIV

It is in this context that I shared the video of a sermon below with my church this week, and then wrote to the congregation also:

In obedience I share this video, the second of the set of videos, by the Pastor of Old Cutler Presbyterian Church in Miami, Pastor Mike. I shared the first one with you already, without any preamble.  I hope you find it as spiritually rewarding as I did. It’s about the sin of ingratitude and features the story of the ten lepers. One of whom only, who was a “ foreigner”, a Samaritan, according to Jesus, came back to give thanks to God. The question is why only one?  And what was his ultimate reward!  Pastor Mike provides an answer that ought to lead us to the true reason for seeking God. At the very end! Although glimpses of it are inserted throughout the sermon. So you have to journey with him, as I did, to the very end. Praise God that I did. Thank you Jesus. 

In obedience 

Shalom

LWJ 

Give me Jesus! In the morning, in the evening, on stormy days in Jamaica, in Gaza, in Israel and even in mighty America – Sermons

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

This week on the show, we wanted to put a Palestinian narrative and perspective on this moment, on how we got to this moment, on what is happening here, alongside an Israeli one. We had Amjad Iraqi, the Palestinian writer and policy analyst on the show on Tuesday. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I really urge you to do so. And today, we have Yossi Klein Halevi for an Israeli perspective, for a Zionist perspective.

Halevi is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He’s the author of, among other books, “Letters to my Palestinian Neighbor.” He’s somebody who spent quite a lot of his life trying to make the Israeli narrative understood to others, a narrative he feels, and has lived very deeply.

He is somebody who believes that narratives that are contradictory, narratives that even oppose each other will have to be held at the same time, that reconciliation, if it ever comes, is not going to come because one story gets judged true and the other false, but because both stories and the many more can be held at the same time, respected, without asking one to triumph over all the others.

At the same time, I want to recognize that this is not just a moment of stories. This is a moment when real people have died and are dying, when real people have been driven from their homes, when bombs are dropping, there was a real massacre in Israel, not just a story, there’s a real invasion of Gaza.

And something else I wanted to talk to Halevi about, as somebody who has covered quite a bit of Israeli security, who has written a book on the Israeli military at one point, or at least a story of the Israeli paratroopers, is, how Israel is thinking about this moment and what it is trying to achieve in the invasion of Gaza. What does it mean to destroy Hamas? What if it cannot do that? What is the acceptable cost? Is there a cost in civilians that is too much?

So we talked through that. As with the previous conversation, not everything in this episode is easy to hear for everyone. Not everything in this episode is something I agree with. But I think it is important to hear. I think it is important to understand what these two societies see right now, the way they understand their interests, the way they understand their past and the way they understand what could potentially be in their future. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Yossi Klein Halevi, welcome to the show.

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Great to be with you, Ezra. Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to start with a little bit of your history. You talk about being a soldier, patrolling Gaza, when you were younger, being part of that occupation and learning things on both sides from it. What did you learn from it? What did it change in your thinking?

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: So I was drafted into the Israeli army in the late 1980s, which was the period that we call the first intifada. It’s like the first Lebanon war. We didn’t know there was going to be a second or maybe a third. We just called it the intifada then.

And my unit served in the Gaza refugee camps. We also served in the West Bank. And I came out of that experience learning two things. The first is that the rule over another people is untenable, in the long term, for a country that wants to be both a democracy and maintain its Jewish majority. And that was a lesson that I learned viscerally. I learned that every day. And it was an overwhelming experience.

The second experience was a direct encounter with the depth, not only of Palestinian rage, and in many cases, hatred, but with the negation of any legitimacy to a Jewish state in any borders.

Just before our unit had gotten to Gaza, an Israeli reservist, driving through Gaza, had made a wrong turn, and ended up in a refugee camp, and was surrounded and burned alive. And we used to get taunted every day that Amnon — that was his name, Amnon. Amnon sends you regards.

So my education was the futility of occupation, on the one hand, and on the other, deep questions about whether we could really negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinian national movement that would be ready to accept the legitimacy of Israel in whatever borders. And that education has shaped my thinking to this day.

And the way that I would put it, Ezra, is that on the one hand, I believe that a Palestinian state is an existential need for Israel. And I also believe it’s an existential threat, especially given what we’ve just experienced on Oct. 7.

The possibility of taking the risk of withdrawing from the West Bank any time soon, and bringing Hamas to within literally five minutes of Tel Aviv, is simply inconceivable for Israelis today, I would say virtually across the political spectrum.

But the one thing that I will say, just to counter that a little bit, is that I’ve learned, in Israel, really never to make definitive statements about the future, even the near future, because it’s so unpredictable. This is such a radically fluid reality.

A month ago, I was standing in the streets, literally every week, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis, demonstrating against the Netanyahu government. Today, this is suddenly the most unified country that we’ve been for decades. And we keep going from one contradictory reality to the next. And that’s so built into the Israeli experience.

And in a paradoxical way, that gives me some hope for the future because those who say a two-state solution is over, it’s dead, it’s finished, so how do know? Look at what just happened in Israel in the last five weeks. How can you make any definitive statement about this crazy place?

EZRA KLEIN: You mentioned the first intifada. And I want to talk about how both intifadas changed Israeli politics. And so beginning with what, as you put it, nobody knew was the first one at the time, what was the first intifada? And how did Israel react to it? How did it change Israeli politics?

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: Well, the first intifada broke out in 1987. And it lasted more or less until the first Gulf War, 1991. It was basically riots. It was young people — large, very large numbers, hundreds, thousands of young people, throwing stones, sometimes Molotov cocktails, every so often, a terror attack. But primarily, it was — the Palestinians call it the intifada of stones. And that’s how I personally experienced it.

I got a stone thrown to my head. And I was briefly hospitalized for that. Luckily, I had a helmet on. And I still blacked out. And there was something visceral about experiencing a rock in your head because a rock is a symbol of powerlessness — I mean, David and Goliath. And it was this encounter with Gaza’s rage.

And I also had a very complicated experience. I came to respect these Palestinian teenagers who were throwing rocks at my friends and me. We were armed. And there was a great deal of courage. And I recognized, myself, as a teenager, in their rage. I was a very strong participant in Jewish activism when I was a teenager in the late ’60s, early ’70s, in the Soviet Jewry Movement, in the violent wing of the Soviet Jewry Movement, fighting police at the Soviet Mission.

And I identified, to some extent, with these kids. And I felt this grudging respect for them. And so it was a very complicated dynamic. And I came out of that experience saying, there’s no way to suppress this. We’re going to have to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism.

And this was true for a very large number of Israelis. I saw it happening in the Army. And every night we would have arguments in our tent camp in Gaza. And you saw even people on the right saying, something has to give here. This isn’t working.

And the political consequence of the first intifada was the election of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. Rabin ran on the slogan, “Take Gaza out of Tel Aviv.” That was the winning post-intifada slogan of Israeli politics — separation. Let — whatever they want to do. A state? Give them a state.

There was something of that mood in Israeli society, a realization that we can’t swallow another people, a people that doesn’t want to be part of us and whom we don’t see as part of the identity we were trying to create in Israel.

So it was a moment of possibility. A year later, the Oslo peace process. And that again, a direct outgrowth of the first intifada. Technically, Israel won the first intifada. We suppressed the riots. It took four or five years. But the riots stopped. But we lost. And we all knew we lost the first intifada because you can’t win that kind of conflict.

And the ’90s, at least the early ’90s, was the time where people like me, who had experienced the intifada literally in our being, felt we needed to try a different way.

EZRA KLEIN: So then let me ask the same question of the second intifada. What was it? What were the tactics of it? And how did it change Israeli politics and society?

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI: So the second intifada broke out in the year 2000, September 2000. And the second intifada was the intifada of suicide bombings. And that went on for five years. And those were the longest five years of my life. And I was raising two teenagers in Jerusalem at the time. Jerusalem was one of the main center points of the suicide bombings. And my kids had numerous close encounters. And they both lost friends. Friends were wounded.

That intifada changed Israeli politics in the opposite way of the first intifada. It brought the right to power pretty much permanently over the last 20 plus years. And it wasn’t only the intensity of the terrorism. It was the fact that it happened after Israel had said yes to two peace offers.

Now, the Palestinians have a very different version of what I’m about to tell you. I’m going to give you the Israeli narrative of what happened. Almost all Israelis deeply believe this, as do I. This is my narrative of what happened, as well. And that is that at Camp David, in July 2000, Israel put an offer on the table of an Israeli withdrawal, a Palestinian state.

It would have involved uprooting dozens of settlements, redefining Jerusalem. And on the Palestinian side, it would have expected the Palestinians to contract the right of return, not to the literal lost homes of the 1948 War, in what is now the state of Israel, but to a part of the Palestinian homeland that would be a Palestinian state, which is to say the West Bank and Gaza.

And Arafat walked away from that offer. Six months later, President Clinton put on the table what he called the Clinton Proposals, which essentially changed the territorial withdrawal to the equivalent of 100 percent.

And I say equivalent because Israel would have kept about 4 percent to 5 percent of the West Bank, that’s closest to the border, in exchange for territory within pre-1967 sovereign Israel. And Clinton adopted the Israeli position that the Palestinians have to confine the right of return to a Palestinian state, and not to the state of Israel. And the Palestinians claim that Arafat did not reject it. The Israelis claim that Arafat did reject it.

This is all by way of trying to explain what the second intifada did to the Israeli psyche. If you believe that your side genuinely tried to make peace, and received, in return, the worst wave of terrorism in Israel’s history, then your first conclusion is going to be that the Israeli left, which promised us peace now, are simply fools.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Israeli left collapsed immediately after the second intifada began. And it never recovered.

The Labor Party today is the smallest party in Parliament, four seats. The Zionist party to the left of Labor, called Meretz, isn’t even in Parliament. That was the shift of the second intifada.

I wasn’t quite sure what to write this morning, to be honest. So I waited upon the Lord, and as I opened my iPad, two articles in The New York Times, which all of us need to read and understand, “presented themselves”. In the context of what was revealed as a priori importance for all human beings this week.

One, a revelation that , “ all things hold together in Christ Jesus”. And the other that “ It is finished” ; the shout of victory from Christ on Calvary as he died. And as I paused writing and went for my early morning walk, the revelation continued. That because all things hold together in Christ, salvation which was completed on Calvary by Christ, is not an end in and by itself, although a glorious gift from God. Forgiveness of Sin, victory of evil and freedom from the fear of death! But in addition to, or part of what God in Christ has done for sinful mankind, Adam’s helpless race, and a broken and disordered creation, is the reconciliation of sinful mankind to God and to ourselves. Which is to know God Himself. The One who even Moses could not see and not die!

I’ve spent virtually all my professional life working for my church in an inner city community. And one of the enduring experiences I’ve treasured is the discussions I’ve had with my Rastafarian brethren, who have consistently recommended that I not only believe in God, but know God Himself. An awesome reality immortalized in song by the hymn writer who penned these existentially important words:

“ But I can love thee too O God, Almighty as thou art. For thou has stooped to ask of me the love of my poor heart”. All of this in Jesus Christ, the Incarnate One, the God-man, in whom all things hold together.

So what lessons do we in Jamaica in particular, and the world in general, need to learn from the devastating earthquake which killed over 130 persons in Nepal last night? And from the report from the article in the same New York Times online publication, on the savagery meted out by both sides, Hamas and Israel, in the current war. And the justification by some Israelis citing Biblical texts about the Amalikites, who God told them to destroy completely.

One is that we need to thank this God for sparing our miserable and disobedient lives here in Jamaica as the recent earthquake could have ended quite differently as we read about Nepal. This as we live in a broken world, and a broken creation occasion by Sin. And creation itself, including climate change and devastating hurricanes can only be held together by Jesus Christ according to the Word of God:

“For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8‬:‭19‬-‭23‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Two is that, the much talked about Two State Solution, though a reasonable aspiration from a human point of view, is not the ultimate solution to the war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Nor any other solution advanced anywhere in the world for wars and rumors of wars. Read carefully the second article about the war! That many young Americans believe that the killings by Hamas can be justified. Read carefully what a far right Rabbi in Israel says about the death of Palestinian children – that better they are killed now before they grow up to become killers. Mercy!.

All of this brings into very sharp focus the existential importance of knowing God for yourself. Lest perish in a earthquake, with no remedy. Lest you justify the killing of the innocent! In Gaza. In Israel. And in Jamaica land we love. And knowing God means that you are committed to sharing the Good News of how Jesus in whom all things hold together sees suffering humanity:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
‭‭John‬ ‭3‬:‭16‬ ‭NIV‬‬

And why the world continues to suffer:

“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”
‭‭John‬ ‭3‬:‭18‬-‭21‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Devastation in Nepal

Soldiers carry the wounded in Nepal

Earthquake in Western Nepal Kills More Than 130

As rescuers searched mountainous villages where the earthquake struck, officials cautioned that the death toll was likely to rise.

By Bhadra Sharma

Reporting from Kathmandu, Nepal

Published Nov. 3, 2023

Updated Nov. 4, 2023, 6:39 a.m. ET

Search and rescue operations continued in Nepal on Saturday after a powerful midnight earthquake in the country’s west killed more than 130 people and left hundreds injured, government officials said.

Rescuers were working to push through roads blocked by landslides and debris to reach the mountainous villages where the earthquake struck. Officials cautioned that the death toll was likely to rise as communication was restored with areas that had been cut off.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported the magnitude as 5.6. Nepal’s National Earthquake Monitoring and Research Center reported the magnitude at 6.4, with several small aftershocks spread over the following hours. It is not uncommon for estimates of an earthquake’s magnitude to differ or for them to be subsequently revised.

I didn’t think I would survive last night. I feel lucky,” Mr. Khatri-Chhetri said. “We spent the night in the open.”

Earthquakes are common in mountainous Nepal, which sits on a fault line of two major tectonic plates. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake in 2015 killed some 9,000 people and damaged about one million structures. Its economic impact, in one of South Asia’s poorest countries, was estimated in billions of dollars.

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from New Delhi.

By Nicholas Kristof

Whats left of a home in a Kibbutz after the slaughter on Oct 7

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Jerusalem

What’s left of home in Gaza after Israel bombed it.

One reason I’m afraid that the worst is yet to come in the Middle East is that the mutual dehumanization is the most savage I’ve ever seen in decades of on-the-ground reporting in the region.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza is destroying tunnels, ammunition dumps and Hamas fighters, yes. But I’m afraid it’s also helping to pulverize the recognition of shared humanity that in the long run allows people to live beside one another in peace. The poisonous hatred in turn is already spilling over to the United States and other countries worldwide.

I was thinking about this as I drove the other day to meet some Gazans who were temporarily allowed to visit Israel and became stuck in East Jerusalem. My Israeli taxi driver refused to enter the Palestinian neighborhood (“If I go there, I won’t make it out”) and finally abandoned me on the side of the road to get a Palestinian taxi. And then when I got to my destination, I interviewed a sweet 57-year-old Gazan woman who was talking to me about the war and told me that she approved of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians.

I pressed her, and she insisted it was fine even to kill a 5-year-old Israeli child, because “they are all Jews and Zionists.”

That conversation pretty much broke my heart. Such bigotry is nurtured by Hamas propaganda but also by Israeli bombing of Gaza: The woman said she had lost two cousins to Israeli fire, including a young woman married only a year ago, and she weeps daily at the bombardment of family and friends in Gaza.

Meanwhile, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the escalation of the ground operation on Saturday, he cited biblical references to the Amalekites, who were the target of a divine genocide. In the story, God’s order was: “put to death men and women, children and infants.” Netanyahu wasn’t advocating that literal policy, but Amalek is a code word that regularly crops up in Israeli politics for a ruthless enemy that must be crushed without mercy.

Some have been more explicit in their biblical exegesis.

“You may think you’re being merciful” by sparing a child, counsels a far-right rabbi in a chilling video posted online, but actually “you’re being vicious to the ultimate victim that this child will grow up and kill.” And this, too, breaks my heart.

There are of course many other voices that are merciful and sensible, and I’ve highlighted them previously. But when children on both sides are slaughtered and people are fearful, it is extremists who invariably are ascendant.

That is the longtime pattern in the Middle East: It was Palestinian suicide bombers who propelled Benjamin Netanyahu into the prime minister’s office, and it has been Israeli hard-liners who fuel extremist Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

“Extremists need each other, support each other,” Eyad al-Sarraj, a Gaza psychiatrist who died in 2013, once lamented to me. He complained that Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007 had turned Hamas fanatics into popular heroes.

Now I fear we face a prolonged war that will make the dehumanization on both sides much worse.

I’m astonished by a survey finding that 51 percent of American 18-to-24-year-olds say that Hamas’s killings could be justified. Have they seen the butchery committed by Hamas?

We’ve already also observed deadly threats to Jews and assaults on them, and posters of Israeli hostages have been torn down. A 6-year-old Muslim boy was murdered in a Chicago suburb in what police say was a hate crime: The boy was stabbed 26 times. I fear there’ll be more of this.

This is a path that leads nowhere, and that’s one reason I hope Israel will rein in the bombing and pursue more surgical strikes while avoiding large-scale urban combat. Whatever you call the Gaza war so far, it is not surgical. The Economist found, based on satellite imagery, that 13 percent of Gazans have had their homes damaged in just three weeks. While the number of dead in Gaza is difficult to pin down, and many bodies are probably still uncounted in the rubble, Unicef now calls Gaza “a graveyard for thousands of children.”

The Oct. 7 Hamas attacks understandably shattered Israel: President Biden noted that if you adjust for population, the death toll was the equivalent of about 15 Sept. 11 attacks. It’s also true, as my colleague Ezra Klein noted in his podcast, that Gaza has suffered the equivalent of about 400 Sept. 11 attacks.

More children have been reported killed in Gaza in the past three weeks than in all global conflicts together in the entirety of last year, Save the Children notes. By the count of the Gaza Health Ministry, which is under the Hamas government but whose figures are roughly accepted by humanitarian agencies and in the past have been used by the State Department, a child has died on average about once every 10 minutes in the war so far.

And the Gaza war is just getting started.

I don’t think this is politically sustainable for Israel, or morally sustainable for America as we provide weapons used to kill and maim civilians. Nor do I believe it will be effective at protecting Israel.

“To kill terrorist leaders without addressing the despair of their supporters is a fool’s errand and produces more frustration, more despair, and more terrorism,” Ami Ayalon, a former leader of the Shin Bet security agency, wrote in his 2020 memoir.

When we see a Doctors Without Borders video of a 9-year-old boy having his foot amputated on a Gaza hospital floor, without adequate anesthesia, as his sister looks and waits for her own surgery, how can we not feel the same revulsion we felt watching Hamas videos of attacks on Israelis?

We can’t undo the mutilations and massacres inflicted by Hamas on Israel three weeks ago, but we can avoid maiming and killing Gazan civilians over the coming months.

If the dehumanization I encountered in Israel and the West Bank was profoundly depressing, I was inspired by those on both sides who press for reconciliation and peace. A Palestinian nurse from Jenin, Mohamed Abu Jafar, whose 16-year-old brother was shot dead by Israeli forces on the street in front of his school, is an example.

“The conflict will not be resolved in military actions,” he told me. “Because they can’t kill us all, and we can’t kill them all.”

The Biden administration says it welcomes a humanitarian pause, and it should push for this more resolutely as an occasion to provide medicine, water and food to civilians while also seeking at least a partial prisoner exchange. It should also ask Israel to refocus its warfare more narrowly on Hamas itself, because every extra bomb that hits civilians digs us deeper into this crater of hatred and will make it more difficult to ever clamber out, look into one another’s eyes and find a path to peace.