Empathy Doesn't Scale
A Team Human conversation with artist/activist Mushon Zer-Aviv
Mushon Zer-Aviv was a student of mine twenty years ago, and now I’m a student of his. For while I was frozen in place after the October 7 Hamas attacks and subsequent Israeli massacres, Mushon — a peace activist in the region who was directly impacted by all this — had no such luxury. He had to respond in real time, and to many things at once, while also figuring out how best to sustain potential for a peaceful future in the face of so much violence and death.
As a proponent of a shared, equal society for everyone in the region, he has enemies and detractors from all sides. But, by the same logic he also has allies everywhere, including me.
Here’s our conversation, which took place the morning after the Israeli-Arab peace group he supports, Standing Together, was banned and boycotted by an American anti-war group (6,000 miles away) for suggesting that Jews be allowed to live alongside Arabs in the Middle East after the conflict is over.
What was most interesting to me about Mushon’s perspective is that he sees empathy as a problem. He wrote a fascinating piece called Your Empathy is Killing Us, in which he explains that empathy does not scale. Rather, it can be weaponized to promote the hostility toward one side or the other. Here he is, talking about the peace group he is working with, A Land for All.
Mushon Zer-Aviv:
It took me years to open up to the hope that is in the heart of this idea because it promotes a new model for the two-state solution.
It's not about the two states based on separation of how we redraw the borders so we don't see each other anymore. The idea is we call it “two states, one homeland.” The idea is that there are two different states with different citizenships and so on, but with open borders and shared institutions. It's based on a confederate model rather than a complete separation.
Douglas Rushkoff:
More like New York and New Jersey rather than the United States and Canada.
Mushon Zer-Aviv:
In a way. More like Germany and France.
Douglas Rushkoff:
In a European Union together.
Mushon Zer-Aviv:
Yeah. The E.U. is a confederacy in that sense.
Douglas Rushkoff:
So it's not totally weird. When I was reading about it, I was thinking, “Could those of us on the same block belong to different nations?” It wouldn't work like that, right ? Like this house is Israel. That house is Palestine. This house is Israel.
Mushon Zer-Aviv:
No, it's nothing like that. It still includes borders and autonomy and administration of land. But it's not based on how we can find a way of separating people.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Right, so you could do anything. I could go to the pool on that side or you can have a job on this side and we're just fine. But you pay your taxes to one side and this one pays their taxes to their side and there's not a wall between the two, keeping your guys out of our side and our side out of yours.
Mushon Zer-Aviv:
Yeah. And obviously today it's very hard to talk about anything like that. The idea of freedom of movement is an open wound on both sides. But, really, the technological and military separation, and — as we tried to argue 20 years ago — the emotional separation, is something that can never promise a future. That's something that would always lead to more hate and more animosity and, at the end of the day, to violence. And the collapse of our ability to have a decent life in this region.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Yeah. But for those of us who are not there, and not that you have to have an answer, but I'm kind of asking for an answer here. What is the appropriate response?
So, we see the events of October 7th on the news. Young women being carried away from Israel and paraded in the streets and being abused, killed and held hostage. Then we see a thug like Netanyahu bombing the smithereens out of people and basically saying, "I don't even want a nation. I don't even care.”
Basically saying stuff that — without even really reading between the lines — he seems perfectly willing to let as many people die as have to in order to find a hostage that may or may not even be in the control of Hamas at this point. He’s even rejecting a two-state solution. He’s talking about no nation. No day after.
My American friends on both sides of this conflict (I hate to even use that kind of terminology) are angry and protesting and using inflamed language. What's the appropriate alternative, if there is one to you? Being angry and shouting in the streets for justice for the people on one’s preferred side of this conflict?
Mushon Zer-Aviv:
One of the signs that I saw that really spoke to that says, “Our grief is not your weapon.”
I think it's a very strong message, because I think our grief has been weaponized, and that's a part of what I was trying to argue. I wrote about this just a few weeks after the beginning of this mess. The title of the piece was Your Empathy is Killing Us. In the piece, I was arguing that empathy has been weaponized and doesn't scale. It doesn't work in a way that you are able to see now more a single person, let alone people from across that represent different nationalities, different sides in a conflict. And the way empathy actually works, it works as a spotlight. It shines light on the one and leaves the rest in the dark. And that has been proven in research.
The thing is that when empathy is being weaponized and when empathy has been used to argue that because of what Hamas did, we only care about the hostages, or because of what the Israeli army did, we only care about the thousands and thousands of people who have been killed and and wounded in Gaza — then there's no way of of expanding from empathy. In comparison, compassion is a slightly more advanced and nuanced perspective that considers the complexity and considers more than one side.