I had a strange dream last night. I was in a kitchen, crouched with a group of men and women, guns on the floor around us. This confused me, because I do not know how to use a gun. Eventually I realized where I was: I was with the Israeli army, and we were at war.

Subconsciously, this made sense. Instinctively, in the interest of honesty, I sympathize with Israel. This does not mean I agree with Israel and what is happening - the occupation horrifies me, the rather indiscriminate slaughter of children horrifies me, and the justification for that killing seems flimsy to me, at best - it just means that, at my very base level, the culture I am most familiar with, most comfortable with, and would most want myself or my loved ones to live inside of, is Israeli. As I parse media about this war, I have to work very hard not to be biased because my inherent bias, whether I like it or not, is toward Israel.

When I realized where I was, I was petrified. As in, I could no longer move in my dream. Despite bullets coming in around me, I was frozen and terrified. I looked around me and no one else seemed to me. No one else was terrified of dying, the way I was. This was strange to me because almost everyone, including me, was just a kid. Not a kid in the sense of a child, but a kid in the sense of they were nineteen or twenty, wide-eyed.

When I woke up, a few things were still stuck with me. One was the terror. Two was the curiosity that I’d subconsciously associated myself with Israel. Three was the surprise that most of the combatants around me were kids. Except this last point made sense, because most of the combatants in this war - on both sides - are, in fact, kids.

My connection to the war in Gaza - and it is a war, not a genocide; genocide is the concerted extermination of an entire people - is tangential at best. One of the first women I feel for was a Jewish woman in the Philly burbs, and she talked longingly about a desire to spend time in Jerusalem and what her faith meant to her. One of my best friends is Jewish, and vigorously defends Israel’s right to exist. For a summer in college, I had an enormous - unrequited - crush on a Palestinian woman in my fiction workshop. We would go out after class and sit on the fountain at Rittenhouse square, watching stoners play four square and musicians play guitar. And, lastly, I was in Israel and Palestine for a week in February. On the bus ride in, I met, and talked to, a brilliant Palestinian man who was getting his PhD at Oxford. In Jerusalem, I had dinner with four young - young being the key word - members of the IDF. Some of them I liked a great deal, and some of them I found vaguely threatening.

Beyond these limited encounters, I am not connected to the war, in as much as any of us can be unconnected from broader human tragedy. I do my best to get unbiased news, but in a situation as loaded as this, no news in unbiased. CNN and Slate write articles lauding the IDF for its progressive approach to civilian casualties and wondering if Hamas does, in fact, instruct residents to stay home, despite Israel’s warnings (and really, what a moment that must be: to get a text from the IDF saying your home is going to be destroyed in ten minutes. What would you take? What could you possibly take?). Al Jazeera writes about the genocide occurring and the concept of Israeli jihad. Turkey’s newspapers write about the “slaughter” of innocent Gazans.

This is to say nothing of the echo chamber of Twitter and Facebook. Pro-Israel voices post photos showing violent riots in favor of Gaza and women covered from head to toe, or they link to articles about honor killings in Gaza; some women even post raunchy photos proclaiming their love for the IDF (this seems an off-shoot of the topless demonstrations last year in Europe, protesting for the “freedom” of Muslim women. Equating nudity and sex with freedom is a fallacy, one that is not going to help women - and this happens everywhere in the world - whose bodies are treated as outlets for man’s every whim). One Jewish friend calls Arabs savages. Pro-Palestinian voices post videos of aid workers being shot at, photos of terrified children and grieving mothers. A Palestinian friend condemns the Zionist bastards to hell.

What is one to do in such a situation? What is believable and what is propaganda? The approach that I’ve found is to believe the worst - I suspect Israel has often been indiscriminate in its killing; I suspect Hamas has buried weapons in schools and encouraged its citizens to stay home to die - but I also try to believe the best. That most Israelis are not trying to kill children. That most Gazans want a peaceful government. That, at a very base level, if you got most Israelis and Palestinians in a room together, or in a corner shop or tea house, without the heightened tensions of the war, they would be able to tell jokes, or to ask about each other’s children.

So much of this war - our sadness and outrage - comes back to children. Those who suffer most from Israel’s occupation and violence - and from Hamas’ completely inept government that has focused more on terror than governance - are children. And those who are being indoctrinated - one missile, one ruined home at a time - into systems of hatred and recrimination are children. Above all, those who are fighting this war - those lobbing the missiles, those who are ruining the homes - are children.

One of the most striking experiences I had in Israel was when I walked around the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s old city, a young man was stopped by members of the IDF. They demanded his ID and without a word, they carried him off. The seeming arbitrariness of it was stunning. But so, too, was the fact that the IDF guards were boys whose faces were still riddled with acne. They looked like they should have been out kissing girls down secluded alleyways, not holding enormous M-16s and being tasked with keeping the peace.

Of course, this is how it has always been. The predilections and prejudices of old men - and they are almost always men - who are separated from every day life are carried out by kids whose lives are just supposed to be beginning. Many times, tragically, those lives are cut short far, far too soon. But in my cynical mood it’s hard not to feel like those boys - and again, they are usually boys - would likely have grown up to be old men holed up in corridors of power, destroying the lives of people they care not to understand. This, ultimately, is what happens to many of those who survive.

What hope is there, then - beyond a facile, unwarranted reliance on the almighty? Trust and relationships cannot be built when one party is looking down the barrel of a gun and the other is seeking cover from rockets. Palestine deserves its own country, but it needs to be a country that is open and safe to Israelis and is significantly better than its Arab neighbors on the issue of human rights and women’s rights. And Israel deserves to protect the borders of a country that - like it not - has been in existence for over 60 years - but it also has no right to respond with excessive, horrifying force. But those things will not happen until its individual citizens - and large numbers of them - are able to have tea with one another, and to talk about their children together. Is that possible in this day and age?

On my ride into Jerusalem back in February, I talked at length with the Palestinian man beside me, the one studying at Oxford. He told me about the last winter, when he got stranded in west Jerusalem during a snow storm.

“The power was out and the roads were impassable. What was I going to do? The police came by and people had volunteered to take in those stranded. I ended up staying with an Israeli family. I was with them for two days. We ate together, drank tea, talked until late in the night. I’m still friends with them.”

I fear there will not be peace in Israel, Palestine, or the larger Middle East for a very long time. There is too much ingrained hatred, and too many different groups have too much money at stake to set aside their arms. Ultimately, one single group is not responsible for this. It is the lingering effects of colonialism, the dangerous equation of religion and politics, the weight of crushing poverty, and the lack of access to economic and educational opportunities. It will take decades, if not centuries, to remedy this problems.

In lieu of a broader peace, such small moments - people coming together to share meals, two strangers sharing stories with one another - are the perhaps the only, minor, hope we have.