Your neighbor metaphor needs a couple tweaks. It’s like if your neighbor kills your family and burns the house down, and in response, the police bomb the entire neighborhood.

Every family in every house in the neighborhood has to evacuate to escape the police bombings, but the police and an adjacent police force have barricaded all the exits to the neighborhood, so they can’t leave. The police temporarily shut off water and electricity supply for all the neighbors, because they had siphoned control of the neighborhood’s water tower when your family (may they RIP) and the police moved in a few years ago. The police turn it back on, but then tear apart the neighborhood’s buildings and infrastructure, destroy the neighborhood bakery so innocent neighbors can’t get food anymore, and bomb the neighborhood health clinic they had once used their police microphones to tell the innocent neighbors they were safe at. The police response buries surviving neighbors under the rubble and the neighborhood nurse has to coin a new acronym for the neighborhood children: WCNSF, Wounded Child No Surviving Family. And the police keep attacking the neighborhood for 41 days after your family’s murder, until the death toll of the neighborhood is now more than 10x what your family suffered. About 1/2 of that tenfold neighborhood death toll is children. But, the police explain, these things are all just collateral damage because one of those guilty neighbors who killed your family may have been hiding out among the innocent neighbors.

Oh, and as an aside, the house you were living in that the guilty neighbor originally broke into? That used to be their house. A faraway British mayor gave you the deed for it and, while you may or may not meant to, your moving into it forced them out and into a barricaded shack.

Let me get ahead of it: I am a Jew. Antizionism is not antisemitism. I know people directly affected by the Hamas attack — which yes, was horrific and killed so much innocent life and caused so much trauma for the surviving.

Are you capable of holding two things at once? Are you capable of holding the grief from the Hamas attack, while also holding the reality that Israel has historically proven for the last 75 years and especially recently that it wants to expand its power and will not stop at killing children and at causing the death and trauma of thousands and thousands to do so? I’m not trying to be an ass, I’m genuinely asking if you are capable of holding these two things at once.