Forty years ago, I worked with an African-American woman who told me her story. I’ll call her Jane.

Jane grew up in the deep south. In 1965, she and the son of the woman for whom her mother worked as a maid fell in love. His family was Jewish.

She was 15 when she became pregnant. At the hospital, when she asked the white nurse to bring her her daughter, who was light-skinned, the nurse said, “We don’t have no nigra babies here.” Jane threw the ice water from the pitcher on the nurse.

A little later, the same nurse came to her because a white child who had been born wasn’t thriving and its mother couldn’t nurse. Would Jane be willing to nurse the baby.

Jane told me she told the nurse she had to think about it. I was surprised. Jane had always seemed like an earth mother to me. So I asked her why she had to think about it.

“Because,” she said, “that child could grow up to kill my child.”

This was 1965. Two years earlier, four black girls were killed in the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing. Jane wasn’t paranoid. There was also the history of enslaved women used as wet nurses to their enslavers’ children.

She did nurse the baby. I asked her what made her decide to do that. She said her mother told her she should because it’s a child.

I don’t know what I would have done.

I have been distraught about the current war between Israel and Hamas.

Children, including babies, were killed or taken hostage by Hamas during the October 7^th attack. Some are still being held hostage, or maybe they have already died. Of the 15,000 killed by the bombing in Gaza, it seems that half of those victims are children. Then there’s those babies in incubators. Survivors of the bombing are at risk of starving; breakdown of infrastructure has rendered drinking water unsafe, making them vulnerable to deadly diseases.

It is undeniable that Hamas showed no mercy on October 7^th. Israeli officials call the death of children in Gaza as collateral damage, blaming Hamas for their deaths. They show no mercy either.

This is a conflict over land. Close to a million Palestinians were removed from their homes to make way for a Jewish state. The Jewish state was created because Jews had nowhere to go as Nazis implemented their “Final Solution.”

It seems to me that Palestinians were and are treated much the way Native Americans were treated as the continent was populated by immigrants from Europe. I worry that Netanyahu’s killing of Palestinian women and children is his version of genocide—get rid of the women and children, you get rid of Palestinian future.

Would an Israeli woman nurse a Palestinian child who wasn’t thriving? Would a Palestinian woman nurse an Israeli child who wasn’t thriving? Or would both decide that the child they would nurse could grow up to kill their child?

I don’t know. I don’t know what I would do.

But as Jane’s mother said, it’s a child.

We need some grace in the world.