Since the morning of October 7, 2023, the eyes of the world have been anxiously fixated on a sliver of land along the eastern Mediterranean Sea that spans 25 miles north-to-south and up to 7 miles east-to-west. Gaza is home to over two-million Palestinian Arabs in one of the most heavily fortified encampments on the planet. The surprise attack by the religious militant group Hamas on Israel that morning put the very worst of our humanity on full display. By day’s end, over 1,100 Israelis were dead. Men, women, and children had been horrifically murdered, brutalized, raped, burned, or dismembered. Additionally, an estimated 250 were taken hostage back into Gaza. One-hundred days later, many have yet to be released or found alive. It is difficult to comprehend the collective trauma of such an event that remains unresolved.

The retaliation from Israel has unleashed a series of endless horrors of their own. Using some of the most modern and lethal weapons of war backed by powerful Western countries like the United States, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, dropped tens of thousands of bombs leveling a majority of the homes and buildings in the overcrowded enclave, and to date killed over 25,000 Palestinian people, many of them children.

The evils of what transpired on October 7 are beyond the imagination of good-willed people. It has left much of the world in shock and anger. Likewise the images of mechanized war against fleeing Palestinians carrying their elderly and young in the streets with few safe places to take cover, find relief, or access food and clean water is just as inconceivable in a post World War era.

Paradoxically, despite such unthinkable atrocities being broadcast around the world, we have normalized these evils. We have normalized the idea of eliminating others. We have normalized our righteous calls to wipe our perceived enemies off the planet. We have normalized the systematic repression of others including dismantling their homes, their schools, their playgrounds, their civic centers, their markets, and their institutions to real life apocalyptic scenes – a state of existence that no one of us would tolerate today. We have normalized war and mass violence, even when done in self-righteous retaliation or in the assumed interest of peace and security.

As ancient wisdom says, “Those who use the sword will die by the sword,” we are reminded every day in the most vivid ways that violence fosters more violence. When innocent lives are at stake and a sovereign future for both Israeli and Palestinian children are in question, every moment matters. This is why we cannot normalize the eradication of others.

When we accept the cycle of death and destruction of our global neighbors, we undermine our very existence and actively work against the evolutionary process that has sustained our survival. When we normalize the eradication of others, we unknowingly accept the fatalistic beliefs of nihilism that we are nothing more than biological accidents destined to self-preservation at the expense of one another. When we normalize the subjugation or the annihilation of others, we actively chose to deny our own humanity and the transcendent values of compassion, curiosity, and creativity – the very principles that have inspired societies and cultures over a millennium to feed and house its own, build hospitals, schools, universities, art galleries, places of worship, and discover solutions that have promoted our survival and vitality.

There are no easy decisions when responding to the atrocities of violence. Justice is always the moral obligation for people of peace, goodness, and hope. But justice, and the means by which justice is executed, is only as good as the collective will of our global community to choose what is best for the whole of humanity, including those who chose evil. Justice informed by compassion and curiosity has the unique ability to see the humanity behind what is rightfully abhorrent to us. Compassionate justice has the power to undermine the belief that normalizes violence as a viable means to a nihilistic end.

Justice does not have to demand violence in response to violence. A better justice, instead, can be a true force for goodness when it begins with compassion and curiosity. Justice then, in this way, can be a method for prevention that births a hopeful and redemptive future for us all.

We cannot continue to normalize the destruction of others. The future of our planet hangs in the balance.