I have a teacher of Hebrew in Tel Aviv named Matan, a teacher of Arabic in occupied East Jerusalem named Yazan, and a friend in Gaza City named Safaa.
I think of them often. Between them, they have taught me something more important than vocabulary: what it costs to love countries that will not love you back or that have stopped loving themselves.
Alan Paton wrote “Cry, the Beloved Country” in 1948, the same year Israel was born and the Nakba — the dislocation of 600,000 Palestinians from their homes — began. He was writing about South Africa, a land of heartbreaking beauty and moral catastrophe, a place where an entire society had organized itself around the degradation of its own people.
He called it a beloved country. The grief in that phrase is unbearable. You do not weep for what you hate. You weep for what you love and cannot save.
I spent this Fourth of July in Israel and Palestine, nine time zones from the country whose birthday it was. There were no fireworks, no flags on porches, no parades — just the ordinary weight of a place that has never had the luxury of taking a day off from its own history. I found myself trying to explain the holiday to friends here, and stalling halfway through, unsure anymore what exactly I was asking them to celebrate on my behalf.
I weep now for two countries at once.
I am an American Jew descended from Tsarist Russia, a grandson of immigrants who fled the old darkness of Europe and arrived at Ellis Island with nothing but hope. I was raised to believe America was the place where hope had been institutionalized — where law constrained power, where the vulnerable had standing, where government drew its authority from the consent of the governed.
I believed those words. I still want to. But it is becoming very hard.
What I see instead is a country abandoning its commitments with barely a blush — a government that dismantles oversight, rewards loyalty over competence, weaponizes the machinery of state against its critics, and tells the poor their suffering is their own fault.
I see billionaires celebrated as philosopher-kings and immigrants treated as vermin. I see a press corps that has spent years learning to normalize the abnormal, a Democratic opposition often brave but rarely unified, and a Republican Party that has traded its soul for a pose.
I see my neighbors in Utah — good, earnest people — told that their public lands are impediments to profit and their water rights are bargaining chips for the well-connected.
This is not a partisan lament. It is older and sadder than that, a lament for a country that had, for all its terrible flaws, a kind of moral seriousness: a belief that the arc of history ought to bend, that each generation owed the next something better than it had received. I no longer recognize that country in the mirror.
And then there is Israel.
After a youth of Jewish education, I came to Hebrew late, as an act of love and curiosity and solidarity — not with a government, but with a people, a language, a civilization of extraordinary richness and grief.
I study with teachers who use theater and poetry, the words of Amos Oz and Hanoch Levin, to ask what it means to live on contested land. I have Israeli friends who ache for something better, who did not vote for this, who march in the streets and are called naïve for it.
And then there is Gaza. What is happening there is not something I can launder into abstraction. Safaa and her family are there among the millions displaced, besieged, bereaved.
I cannot call what is being done in Israel’s name, with American weapons and American diplomatic cover, anything other than what it is: a catastrophe, moral and strategic and human, that will take generations to reckon with. A democracy that makes collective punishment into policy, that silences its own dissenters under the banner of wartime necessity, that lets settlers terrorize the West Bank while the world watches.
That country has also lost something it may not get back.
I know Israel was born in genuine trauma. I know Oct. 7 was a horror without mitigation. I carry those truths with me.
But grief does not exempt a nation from conscience, and trauma does not suspend ethics. The silence of so many American Jews — people who would quote Paton, and Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King in any other context — is a silence that shames us.
Matan, Yazan, and Safaa. Tel Aviv, East Jerusalem, and Gaza City. Oakley, Utah, and Washington, D.C. The distance between what these places promised and what they have become is the distance I am asked to live in every day.
Cry for thy beloved countries — not because we hate them, but because we love them and cannot look away, and because love without truthfulness is just another form of abandonment. We owe them, and each other, more than that.
Rick Shapiro is a retired lawyer and public affairs executive who lives in Oakley.