Yes! Jesus! You're finally beginning to understand the meaning of empathy! Empathy is difficult, especially for people whose lives are different to yours. It is not just a matter of reframing your current biases in a way that ignores the people you’re talking about.

If you had been born and raised in Gaza, if you'd been through what they'd been though, you would not be "you." Your values and feelings would be significantly different.

But you can approximate this alternative version of yourself by genuinely trying to put yourself in their place.

Imagine that a foreign power appeared in your country or state tomorrow and killed thousands of people, including someone you love deeply: your wife, your parents, your children, your friends. Imagine they forced you to leave your home and everything you had behind and you never got the opportunity to return. Imagine any of the scenarios I've laid out in the article.

This is Zionism from their perspective.

Again, this person you're imagining wouldn't quite be you, because these things haven't happened to you. But sincerely thinking about it gives you a brief insight into the position that millions of people over there are actually facing at this very moment.

Now imagine a gang of total psychopaths rose up to fight this invader. Would you condemn them for being the only people in the world fighting on your behalf? Would you demand they recognised your invader's "right to exist"? I don't think so. Would you try to overthrow them because they were also making life harder for you? That's a possibility. Some people would, others wouldn't. But now, again, go deeper. How are you supposed to overthrow them? What happens if you succeed? Just the same crushing status quo that you've been living with for decades?

As for empathy for the Israelis, I've gone through exactly the same process to the best of my ability.

For most Israelis this is easy. They live in a society that is unjust, maybe they talk about it now and then, but they mostly push it out of their minds. I say this is easy because it's exactly what I do about the things the West does in the world.

When I use my iPhone, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the people working in horrible conditions to make it, I don't think about the billions of people for whom its sticker price is several years wages, I don't think about the children working in mines to extract the materials or the conflicts that capitalism and our politicians' greed have sparked around the world. I'm not sitting on a moral high horse when it comes to most Israelis.

Although if somebody said this society needed to change, if the price of my iPhone tripled so that these people could receive a living wage, I’d fully support that. I wouldn’t spend all my time making stupid, disingenous justifications like thise that are currently littering my comments. I would quite happily live a less comparatively luxurious life for the sake of billions who have next to nothing.

The settlers are different though. I've listened to dozens of first-hand accounts from them, I've made every effort to hear them give their side in their own words, and the truth is, they're fanatics and fascists. I know this sounds as if I'm abandoning empathy, but I'm really not.

Here's a young settler woman laughing as she admits that she's a fascist (this whole video is very well worth watching). Here's an American man, who genuinely doesn't seem able to understand that stealing a Palestinian woman's house, right in front of her, is wrong. Here are some young Israeli settlers using the IDF to help them push a Palestinian off land he's been living on for generations. They're at least ashamed enough that they don't want their faces to be filmed. Here's an entire audience of Israelis cheering and laughing as their journalists rant, Hitler-esque, about slaughtering children.

I don't know how to empathise with this mindset.I don't know what environment might produce it. I don't know what questions to ask myself to even begin. And I'm honestly grateful that I don't. Yes, fear, trauma, indoctrination, Jewish supremacy, those are all factors but I admit, I can't make sense of it. Can you?

But regardless, I know that what they're doing is wrong. I know that I can't really distinguish this mindset from Nazism or Islamic extremism or the racists of the KKK. It's evil. It cannot be allowed to flourish. And I'm really not convinced it can be reasoned with.

Israeli society needs desperately to acknowledge and address this problem. But it seems as if the opposite is happening.