Seventy thousand civilian victims later, I am sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu and his supremacist acolytes handling matters in the worst possible way—massacring civilians, women, and children indiscriminately—without, however, managing to oust Hamas’s killers or end the ordeal of the Israeli hostages torn from their families for the past two years.

And I am dismayed to see you incapable of voicing the slightest criticism or reservation in the face of the slaughter taking place in Gaza! I don’t know how to react when I see you dodging the issue with semantic quibbles (about the definition and instrumentalization of the word “genocide”; the criteria that may define a “state of famine”; whether or not to capitalize the M in Muslims—who, unlike Jews, are “not a people”; etc.), all to sidestep the question and avert your gaze from the horror unfolding before our eyes. And when pressed by a somewhat insistent interviewer, I am dumbfounded to hear you falter, mumbling without conviction: “No, Netanyahu is only defending himself. It’s the Palestinians who don’t want peace!”

O rage! O despair! Has the trauma of October 7—whose pain and gravity I do recognize—so dehumanized us that we have become incapable of empathy for others?

This summer, presenting his new film On War (inspired by the epistolary exchanges between Einstein and Freud on the subject) at the Cinémathèque Française, the renowned Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai—who masterfully wields “the pessimism of reason and the optimism of the will”—identified in the post–October 7 wars a grave and unprecedented phenomenon never before seen in seventy years of Israeli-Arab conflict: “Neither side is any longer capable of perceiving or feeling the suffering of the other.”

And so, my friend, this lack of empathy has driven you into a denial that strays from the humanist ideals we once shared. How else to explain that an intellectual who claims to be humanist and progressive could post on that cesspool known as social media a post with negationist undertones, asserting that there is no famine in Gaza because “after a Google search, I found plenty of restaurants still open to the public in Gaza”?

Nor can I understand how you could write, without any nuance, that “there are no journalists in Gaza, only terrorists with press cards!” I was all the more shocked since, three days after your post, a young Gazan reporter I had worked alongside at the Arabic-language desk of the British newspaper The Independent was killed in the bombing of a hospital in Khan Younis. On her London newsroom’s WhatsApp group, she had left a message just hours earlier, saying she was heading there in hopes of finding Wi-Fi to file her daily report. Her sad yet determined voice still resonates in my ears. And I can assure you—she was nothing like “a terrorist with a press card.”

We live in a mad era dominated by binary visions. Yet I have not lost hope that, as humanists, we could and should rise above identity pigeonholing.

The duty of a humanist — and I know you still claim that label — is not to offer unconditional, blind support for Israeli policies, nor to justify or deny the horror and the war crimes. Even if it is perfectly legitimate to be pro-Israeli, we have a duty to tell Israelis that they will not defeat Hamas’s fanaticism or secure peace, safety, and the long-term survival of the State of Israel without restoring hope to the Palestinians. It is impossible to fight the fanatics in the other camp while fostering fanaticism within your own ranks! The place for racists, supremacists, and other war criminals is in court or in prison, not in ministerial offices. For these people are not only “wolves” toward peace and the Palestinians, but also toward their own people — sullying their reputation and trampling ancestral morality.

So, for all these reasons, my friend, please — let us not throw Palestine away with Hamas’s bathwater!