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Good Morning,

I’ve been in Israel listening to different forms of pain. Pain makes holes in the heart. It pierces to depths beyond all sides, except the side of humanity.
I’m in the flat of Ayelet, mother of nineteen-year-old Naama, held hostage by Hamas for six months. I’m welcomed like family. The dog stops barking at me. Naama’s friends describe how they shared their homework. ‘How can I help?’ I ask helplessly. ‘Send good energy; it gets through. Don’t let my daughter be forgotten.’

I’m with an Israeli Arab family I’ve been close with for years, but mustn’t name. The woman puts her finger to her lips: ‘It’s hard to talk.’ Trust is another victim of the calculated horrors perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, and this terrible war. How in this grief-wracked land can Jew trust Arab, or Arab Jew? Can the wounds be cauterised through which trust bleeds? The woman’s brother arrives, full of warmth. Hope rises.

I recall how, in a previous conflict, I’d visited Al Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem, which was receiving children from Gaza. ‘Is that your son?’ I’d asked the man sitting silently at the bedside of a child covered in bandages. ‘I’m his uncle. The bombs killed his family.’ Wordless, I’d tried to gesture my sorrow.
Today again, so many innocent people in Gaza are trapped in desperate wretchedness, with so many awful deaths. Tragically, horribly, aid workers have been killed too.

Now I’m at the site of the Nova festival, where hundreds were slaughtered by Hamas. I wander through the field planted with a eucalyptus sapling for every person killed. Many have pictures by them, beautiful faces: ‘We long for you.’ ‘We love you.’

Different forms of pain don’t cancel each other out. Each is terrible. One grieves for everyone.

Pain, unhealed, doesn’t evaporate; it slips into the veins of generations. It readily morphs into bitterness. There are plenty of hate-mongers, experts in recruitment, who know exactly what poisons to pour into wounds to make them suppurate.

But pain, alternatively, can deepen the heart, especially when it encounters healers. Despite the war, there are many. Remarkably, there are Israelis and Gazans still messaging each other: ‘Are you OK? I worry for you.’

Can we, too, be healers, not haters, and do as Sharone, daughter of hostage Oded Lifschitz, said, here on Radio 4. She didn’t mince words about the cruelty and responsibility of Hamas. Yet she said: ‘I demand of myself to feel the pain of others.’

That’s our only ultimate hope.

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