Yuval Noah Harari

Like you show them images of a starving child in Gaza, they will say, this is fake news.

or they will immediately divert the discussion to something else.

This is because of Hamas.

Or if you said, I don't care, just are you able for a few seconds just to be there and acknowledge that there is a suffering human being there?

It's extremely difficult to do it.

Even if you tell them Israel is 100% correct.

100% of the fault for what happens in Gaza is Hamas.

Everything Israel does is 100% correct.

Since it is so correct, since this is so just, it should be easy for you to observe the consequences of your perfect justice.

Here, just look at this image.

And so many people just can't do it.

That historically, and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation, Judaism positioned itself, since the destruction at least of the Second Temple, in opposition to this view of the world as governed only by brute force.

You know, when the Roman legions of Vespasian destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE, and you have Yohanan ben Zakkai asking Vespasian as a favor, grant me a small town called Yavne, near Tel Aviv of today, where he wants to establish a center of learning.

And Vespasian agrees, okay, you Jews, you can have your center of learning.

And since then, for 2,000 years, Jews in Yavne and then in Cairo and Baghdad, in Poland, in Brooklyn, they study, they learn.

This is, again, this was the essence of Judaism.

Previously, it was a religion of temples and priests and bloody rituals.

And then it became a religion of learning.

And if you try to think what was the most important message

of Jews over the last 2000 years to humanity, I would say that it was the message that it is okay to be different.