Please keep reading even if the event feeds a narrative that is inconvenient to your opinions. Please keep reading even if you want to shut such horrors out of your awareness. I promise I will take this to a place where something on the other side of horror is visible.

I first read about the massacre here. Israeli forces had surrounded a residential building with tanks and bulldozers. IDF soldiers stormed the building. Residents pleaded with them that they were civilians. The soldiers took out all the men. They tortured them in front of their families. Then they forced them to bend over and executed them, executed husbands in front of their wives and fathers in front of their children. Then they began shelling the building. The women and children fled. A 3-year-old bled to death in her sister's arms.

You might be expecting my report of this event to be the entree to a "case" – a case that Israel is committing war crimes, for instance, that it is ethnically cleansing Gaza, and so on; in short, that right is on one side and wrong is on the other.

Such a case would be easy to make, but that is not what I am here to do. That doesn't mean that such distinctions are invalid, nor that the two sides are equivalent. However, the reflex of distinguishing right from wrong and victim from perpetrator, valid and useful though it may be, can short-circuit a process of compassion that leads to another level of understanding and new possibilities for peace.