Hold two thoughts in your head at the same time:

1. What Hamas did in Israel is unspeakably evil, beyond barbaric. It is cruel, inhumane, and plain awful in every aspect. It should be condemned at every level of human society, and its perpetrators punished severely.

2. Israel's longstanding treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and elsewhere is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. The United Nations has classified the Gaza Strip as "unlivable" and an open-air prison. There is now a third generation of Palestinians who were born and raised in this place, whose grandparents were forcibly relocated there. A brutal war against them in retaliation for Hamas' actions is not going to make them more accepting of the Israeli occupation. 

Each of these two thoughts does not negate the other.  The first thought does not make the thinker Islamophobic, and the second thought does not make the thinker anti-Semitic.

I can't look at this situation with anything less than horror, and with extreme compassion for those suffering on both sides of the razor wire.  And while I cannot describe my feelings toward the Hamas terrorists as "compassionate," I do feel sorry for them, that their hearts and minds have become so twisted and sick with hatred that they've become the monsters they were last weekend. 

The song in the video above is called Asaph by the vocal trio Mycale, assembled by the composer John Zorn to perform songs from Volume 13 of his Book of Angels, the second series of his Masada compositions.  I've been listening to Masada this week to keep my mind and my heart open to the human suffering on the other side of the world.