‘I refuse to let my humanity be stripped away. I refuse to build my national aspirations on the blood of civilians.’

By Talal Jabari

Israeli emergency services volunteers remove blood, according to Jewish tradition, from the scene of an attack by two Palestinians against Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Har Nof in West Jerusalem, November 18, 2014. Two Palestinians armed with guns, a meat cleaver and knives burst into a Jerusalem synagogue and killed four Israelis before being shot dead by Israeli forces. (Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

The first thing I do every morning before getting out of bed is to turn off my phone’s airplane mode and read the news. There’s never any positive news, and I’m sure starting off the day this way probably isn’t healthy, but nevertheless, that’s what I do. On Tuesday, I woke up, as did many others, to this story: four dead Israelis in a synagogue shooting.

Personally, I just can’t accept gunning down people who are in the middle of prayer. After all, synagogues, churches and mosques are houses of God. But God wasn’t at home in the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue on this particular morning.

There are people who will disagree with me. Indeed there are those who even celebrated the attack at the synagogue. It’s possible some of them see it as vindication for the deaths caused by the Israeli army during the last Gaza war, revenge for the brutal slaying of Mohammed Abu Khdeir by Israeli settlers, or as protest over the ongoing situation at Al-Aqsa Mosque or some sort of retribution for the death of Yusuf Hassan al-Ramouni a day before.

What is certain from the events of the past six months is that increasingly, this conflict is stripping people of their humanity — on both sides of the divide.

As a human being, I find the synagogue attack unacceptable, and even more so as a Palestinian because it just feels so familiar. As I lay there in bed reading the news, I couldn’t help but remember my childhood. I thought back to the 1990 Aqsa Mosque massacre, in which tens of Palestinians were killed and injured. I thought back to the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, when an American-Israeli surgeon gunned down dozens of Muslim worshippers as they prayed.

I thought back to the mosque that was burned earlier in November by Israeli settlers, and the numerous other mosques that have met the same fate through settler violence or army bombing. I thought back to the numerous churches that were defaced by right-wing Israelis with slogans insulting Jesus.

As I was filming for a documentary last week in Dura Al-Qare, a Palestinian village adjacent to the settlement of Bet El, I came across a shipping container with the Hebrew word for “revenge” spray-painted on the side by area settlers. And I couldn’t help but wonder for what it was that they sought revenge. Their government kills a Palestinian every three days on average. They are comfortably living on occupied territory in the West Bank. They carry out attacks against the Palestinian civilian population at will and with no recourse. And yet they call for revenge.

They build shrines to Jews who have killed Palestinians, like Baruch Goldstein and they idolize Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose anti-Palestinian sentiments were often translated into violent action. These are the people who slay innocents during prayer, who kill civilians on busses, who shoot at farmers.

That is why I don’t condone the attack against in the synagogue. Because I refuse to let my humanity be stripped away; because I refuse to build my national aspirations on the blood of civilians; because I refuse to stoop down the level of the very people who celebrate violence against Palestinians and call for “revenge.”

Talal Jabari is a Palestinian award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist from East Jerusalem. He tweets from @TalalJabari.