A year ago 18 of us were packing that last bag for EWT’s trip to Israel, Jordan and Egypt. The response to the trip had been one of the strongest that EWT had had in decades. I’d forewarned everyone before they reserved that I’d hired a Palestinian guide recommended by Rick Steves. I wanted to be clear that I felt the Israeli perspective was much better understood by Americans than the Palestinian one.

A few days before the end of the Israeli program, several Jewish members of the trip politely told me that they were leaving early. They were too kind to explain further. I understand better now why they did. And I’m so sorry that it took a 9-11 event for me to grasp this.

On our seventh day we visited the Jenin Palestinian Refugee Camp not too far from the Lebanese border. It was certainly one of the most depressing tourist “attractions” that I’d ever seen. Part of the day was spent visiting residents who had been there since the 1950s, had had children and grand-children but had never been able to leave.

The sun was just setting as our day tour ended, turning the monotonous cement structures that crowd 11,000 people into 100 acres into a weird dark, claustrophobic rasterized image of a human city.

Our bus went faster and faster as it ticked off squared-off block after squared-off block, but it was already too dark to see very far down the long center road to the exit. We all got very nervous, wondering if we’d ever get out. We must have been traveling north to south, or vice versa, because each intersection was a bit brighter than the road in between, diffusing bits of twilight into a heavy fog/smog mix.

I remember as we crossed one intersection that what was left of twilight carried a blurred, pixelated image from down a long cross street of two heavily armed Israeli soldiers chasing youngsters who stopped occasionally to turn around and throw rocks (or Molotovs?) at them.

My wife spent six weeks right after college on a kibbutz on the Lebanese border not long after the Yom Kippur War. She understood my design for a Palestinian perspective but was critical as the 7-8 day trip progressed that it wasn’t more balanced.

She was right. I couldn’t comprehend what past inhumanity could justify the current inhumanity that was being shown to us in spades. That, of course, was the error of my thinking: You can’t justify inhumanity. That’s not the issue. The issue is survival.

And that leads to the terrifying realization that inhumanity is used to survive.

That leads to the incredible body of legal and moral equivocation that allowed the Guantanamo torture, “home defense” laws currently in fashion, unstayed Second Amendment obsessions, the growing allowances for hate speech and much more. Not least of which is the dark Biblical eye-for-an-eye retribution.

Unfortunately, there seem to be degrees of inhumanity: It’s OK to throw napalm at Vietnamese but not cluster bombs at Ukrainians. But what actuary can tally the inhumanity of an imprisoned Jenin great-grand mother with the wanton slaughter of an entire family at a harmless music festival? Just because one is incremental as the decades pass and the other is instant, is one OK but the other isn’t?

Is the swift eradication of six million innocents in the Holocaust more awful, just as awful, less awful than the prolonged eradication of native Americans or the enslaving of at least 20 million Africans over a century? This is so crazy, trying to balance the wildly evil consequences of such horrors.

But that’s what happens when one side suffers its comeuppance from the other: Inhumanity gets calibrated. Good is sometimes less bad and bad is sometimes a wee bit good.

History is packed with so much of this reserved blame, that when this dosey-doe of good and bad began to entangle common sense will probably never be discovered.

I’ve always felt that religion is mostly to blame, because it preserves really, really ancient histories as the deeds to humanity. Needless to say these are conflicted. Am I an infidel? Is the Syrian a terrorist? Who owns Jerusalem?

We laugh or at least wince tongue-in-cheek as we remark how Jesus turned the other cheek. We dismiss with near comical casualness the retribution of an eye-for-an-eye as unmodern.

Even though we know all of this is either complicated to a fault or nonsense, we still embrace it fully before launching the missile.

Mining history is a great way to justify inhumanity. So let’s get real. Dump religion for a Kissinger-like real politick applied to human morality: What is, is. What has been isn’t any longer. This absolutely impossible endeavor would then have to be followed by another:

Inequality would have to be quickly and massively reduced. That’s the only demonstration that we really believe that humanity is one.

Any bets?

Probably not. But if this is just fanciful thinking what should we do?

Survive.