# Why did we perpetrate the Oct. 7 Massacre? I would like to explore what it might mean to adopt a human perspective on Israel-Palestine. What I mean by a human perspective is one in which I peer out at the world from within a "we" constituted by all the human beings who live in this region. Adopting a human perspective in this way does not preclude other identity structures that construct different versions of "we". For example, I identify both as a Jew and a father. I can seamlessly pivot, without feeling any contradiction, between thinking of "we" as my nuclear family and then as the Jewish People. In the same way, I can pivot between thinking of myself as a Jew, so that "we" are Jews, and thinking of myself as a human, so that "we" are humans beings. I often pivot between the "we" of my family and other versions, such as Jews or Israelis. But only rarely do I adopt a truly human perspective. In fact, the attempt to do this stretches something in me, as if adopting a human perspective requires stretching the rings of my identities beyond their present elasticity. In this brief essay, I want to make that stretch and ask: Why did we perpetrate the Oct. 7 massacre? And why did we then bomb millions of innocent people, killing tens of thousands, and leave those who survived to homelessness, starvation and disease? Before I try to outline answers to these questions, I want to address two objections to framing things in this way. Both objections were offered by a good friend. His first objection was that it sounded to him as if I was attempting to evade reality, in which we are concrete flesh and blood people who live as Palestinians or as Jews. We are not abstractions residing beyond Rawl's veil of ignorance. He added that in reality, unlike in my mind games, there are plenty of people who seek to kill me because I am a Jew. I think that this objection touches on something important, but reflects a misconception. As I sit and write these words, peering out onto the world from my human perspective, I do so as a warm fuzzy mammal, right here and right now. My view is not obscured by a veil of ignorance. If someone comes along and tries to kill me, I might try to kill them first, and even in the ensuing flood of adrenaline and blood, I can still know that both I and this person, who lies dying at my feet, or perhaps I lie dying at theirs, are both human beings. Being "human" is not more abstract or detached than being a Jew. Both rings of identity, the human and the Jewish, involve symbols or fictions through which I understand my place in the world. This mix of fact and fiction is just the way we humans are: We are physical beings who experience the world through symbolic structures such as our various rings of identity. In the concreteness of my physical existence, vulnerable to both the word and the gun, I can still recognize myself and those around me as human beings. His second objection also touches on something important: He said that he will gladly take off his "nationalist glasses" and put on the spectacles of my proposed human perspective, exactly one second after Palestinians do the same. The intuition behind this objection is that there is something generous or forgiving about seeing ourselves and others as human beings. But I think the fact that I can choose to kill my fellow human highlights that this is not the case. I can be human, and also suspicious, or even murderous, towards other humans, just as I can act in the same way towards Jews. Recognizing myself and my fellows, including my enemies, as human beings involves becoming cognizant of a truth about the reality in which we live - we are, in fact, humans - and does not imply that we should trust other people or neglect self-defense. Rather than thinking of our refusal to adopt a human perspective as an advantage, we should regard it as placing blinders over our eyes that hinder our attempt to survive. Certainly, in a situation of mortal combat, it would make little sense to refuse to remove blinders that obscure a clear view of the battlefield until one's enemy agreed to do the same. We humans have been massacring each other long before the emergence of "Jews" and "Arabs". Trying to solve this conflict while disregarding it's deep human roots is like trying to solve global warming within the borders of a single country: To arrive at an accurate evaluation of the issues at stake, we simply require a broader point of view. So why did we perpetrate the Oct. 7 massacre? First of all, I don't think we can know for sure. Humans don't have access to objective and comprehensive knowledge about the "why" of who we are and what we've done. We offer narratives about the decisions we make, and these sometimes contain real insight, but if we are honest with ourselves we'll recognize that such narratives always reflect how we feel about those decisions in the present, how we want other people to think of us, and a host of other things. Also, thousands of us participated in the Oct. 7 massacre, and no two of us committed the atrocities for exactly the same reasons, or in exactly the same mind set. We know this from our own lives. just like when I participated in Israel's military regime of discrimination and persecution of Gazans in Gaza. We tend to talk about big events like the massacres of Oct. 7 and subsequently in Gaza as if, unlike in our personal lives, we really know what's going on, but I think this is an illusion. On the other hand, we must try to understand, if we wish to cease destroying ourselves. Why do we destroy ourselves? This line of thought lead me to start reading about violence more generally. Now I feel like I can't really write this, I have no idea why we are violent. Its a huge field, touching on every aspect of psychology, sociology, economics, politics... I imagined i would write something about how hamas and israeli apartheid are related. i still can, but is not really an answer to the quesion: why did we perpetrate? I guess its a useful thing to discover: My intuitive sense that I know why we did it may be based on ignorance of a million factors.