Watching the suffering in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, we are waiting for President Biden, the one who on the evening before his inauguration spoke of suffering and healing. We are waiting for that leader who consoled a grieving nation in a remembrance ceremony honoring those who died of the Covid-19. We are waiting for the man who gave a clear message that night, “to heal, we must remember. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember. But that is how we heal.”

An exhausted people after four years of Trump, we were so moved when Joe Biden demonstrated the significance of compassion as a fundamental must for a leader. We have appreciated every time President Biden told someone in pain that he understood suffering and the difficult journey that humans take to get through tragedies. A mensch we called him.

In the last two weeks we have been watching the tragedy that is taking place in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. We see on our screens the horrific loss of life, we listen to the cries at funeral, we hear the anguish, and the hopelessness and helplessness of people of good will to stop the suffering, the rockets, the bombing, the citizens fighting on the streets.

It has been most distressing to see that President Biden who could act to stop the killing chose to offer a tepid message of “supporting” a cease-fire allowing the blood shed to go on, by standing with PM Netanyahu. This is not the first time that Netanyahu repeats the same slogan, he would continue to bomb Gaza and put an end to Hamas’ power. Over the years and in between these declarations, Gaza has become a place of despair. It has been very clear that Netanyahu had no intention to deal or negotiate with Hamas, that served his purpose to make sure that there would be never be a Palestinian state. Whenever he moved on de facto annexation he would shout, “Hamas!” On Wednesday he told 70 diplomats that his current bombing effort has been to “degrade” Hamas’ power yet he threatened to not rule out reoccupying Gaza, which he has no intention of following. He told the diplomats (including the Americans) that it is their interest to support his position, “I’m not shy about saying it openly, I think you should support Israel strongly because this is not merely a question of Israel’s security, it’s a question of our common security and our common interests in the Middle East.” As many observers have suggested, Netanyahu and Hamas need one another to convince their followers that there is no alternative to the present course.

This is a deep tragedy and it is difficult to unravel its long knots. Without getting into questions of its origin, we can recognize that now, and for many decades one of the basic problems is amorality. Most people on both sides do not see their counterparts as human, as moral actors. We draw on Howard Thurman to have a more sociopolitical understanding of the limits of empathy in such situations. This is what Thurman wrote about his childhood in Daytona in the 1910s: “When I was a boy growing up in Florida, it never occurred to me, nor was I taught either at home or at school, to regard white persons as falling within the magnetic field of my morality. To all white persons, the category of exception applied. I did not regard them as involved in any religious reference. They were not read out of the human race—they simply did not belong to it in the first place. Behavior to them was amoral. They were not hated particularly, they were not despised; they were simply out of bounds. It is very difficult to put into words what was at work here. They were tolerated as a vital part of the environment, but they did not count in.   They were in a world apart, in another universe of discourse. To lie to them or to deceive them had no moral relevancy; no category of guilt was involved in my behavior…What was true for me as a boy was true also of any little white boy in my town with an important and crucial difference! The structure of the society was such that I was always at his mercy. He was guaranteed by society. I was not. …Thus I was taught to keep out of his way, to reduce my exposure to him under any and all circumstances. I lived in a segregated world into which he could come and go at will; but into his world I could go only when directed or on business. His behavior tended to be unpredictable and irresponsible, therefore in no sense binding upon him. I was frozen in my status; he was fluid in his.”

This is not quite the situation between Jews and Palestinians in sovereign Israel today. It most closely resembles the situation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Within Green Line Israel there is more interaction as equals, and more pretense of equality, than existed in Jim Crow Florida, and this is particularly true for the growing numbers of Hebrew-fluent, Israeli-college graduated members of the Israeli-Palestinian middle class. And in Gaza a generation has grown up that has had little direct contact with Israelis, without lessening the role of the abstraction known as “Israel” in their lives. Yet the general point still holds.   Most people on both sides see their opposites without empathy, and deny their essential humanity. They are people to whom you can, with a clean conscience, lie to, deceive, cheat. If you have power over them, you exercise it. If you are weak, they are obstacles to navigate around with the minimum amount of unpleasantness. This has been the basic reality in Israeli-Palestinian relations for decades; both sides are greatly annoyed by the presence of the other, but one side commanding the heights of power. To paraphrase Thurman, Jews can live fluid lives, while Palestinian lives are often frozen.

That kind of separate existence cannot muster compassion. What wins the day is violence and counter-violence. There is no excuse for rocket fire against civilian population, and arguably, even less, launching rocket barrages without adequate protection to Gazans against Israeli counter-attacks, and there is no excuse for a war against a population by sophisticated air assaults that is essentially defenseless. Both sides have their political agendas, and see war as a good proxy to achieve that, and the irony is that both sides, Netanyahu and Hamas will likely come away strengthened, not weakened. That is another story.

But this is a story about compassion. Real compassion, not feigned concern, is one of Biden’s great strengths. He has known great suffering in his own life, and conveys it regularly. He connects to suffering through his own life experiences. It is a rare, yet necessary, attribute in a political leader.

It seems that the president’s compassion, and official America’s compassion for the Palestinians has always been limited. President Biden has seen the Palestinians from the Israeli perspective, as obstacles, as impediments to Israel’s status. He, and the two political parties, have generally seen Palestinians not with hatred, but with pity. You only pity your inferiors. Compassion means treating the other as your equal. Compassion means listening to the other, and not telling them what to do from a vantage of superiority.

Biden has been slow to act, and has continued to support Netanyahu, but there has been an unprecedented amount of push-back from the progressive left in the Democratic Party, and some indication that he might be listening. The rockets and air strikes will soon end. Then the hard work will begin.

To demonstrate what America can do, President Biden must insist on an immediate cease-fire and follow his own words, “It is hard, sometimes, to remember. But that is how we heal.” President Biden who spoke to us with compassion on the eve of his inauguration is the very person to suggest to both sides that they try to create a truly compassionate understanding of the other. Compassion is not just an emotion it is a call to action. When enemies start treating one another as human beings with reciprocal moral responsibilities, they are beginning to treat one another as equals. And whatever political arrangements are made, the recognition of the other’s humanity is the only basis for any progress. And we need, in Thurman’s words, “to extend the magnetic field of our morality” to all the actors in Israel and Palestine. And President Biden must tap on his deep reservoir of compassion and help show us the way.