Every year, on the day of atonement, the ancient Hebrews would take a goat, lay upon it all the guilt and misdeeds of the community, and cast it out into the wilderness alone, blameless, and burdened with sins that were not its own. Isabel Wilkerson, in the book Caste, traces how this ritual is ever present and evolving. The scapegoat transformed from a sacrificial animal into a people, designated, generation after generation, to absorb the anxieties, failures, and moral debts of a dominant culture so that everyone else could move forward feeling clean. The scapegoat doesn’t create the community’s sins but simply carries them. And crucially, it gets blamed for the suffering that follows.

In Palestinian culture, the goat, or the maeaza, is a living, breathing part of daily life. Foundational to traditional livelihoods across the region, the maeaza provides milk, meat, and wool. It represents adaptability, deep rootedness, and survival against difficult terrain. It is one of the oldest symbols of Palestinian pastoral existence, of a people concretely, intimately connected to their land and to each other across generations. 

What does it cost to produce the feeling of cleanliness? And what does that mean that so many of us, right now, are paying that cost without knowing it?

The mechanism Wilkerson describes requires above all, one thing. It isn’t hatred, although hatred definitely helps. It’s not even ignorance, though ignorance is an undoubtedly useful security blanket. It requires that the community be able, at the end, to feel clean. To disperse from the ritual lighter than they arrived. To return to their lives with the quiet, unexamined sense that the world is, despite everything, more or less as it should be.

What the scapegoating ritual offers is a resolution to a question that every hierarchical society must answer, again and again, in order to hold itself together: is the order of things just? The suffering of the designated group, when the ritual is working, answers: yes. The suffering is over there. It belongs to people who are, in some manner the community has agreed, quietly and collectively, different enough to have deserved it. It is a belief that operates below articulation, in the register of feeling. Clean is a feeling, something that cannot be replicated or articulated universally. 

I’m sure you have seen the devastating video accounts of the genocide occuring in the West Bank, but to truly witness what is happening is not simply to feel sad. It is to have that feeling dissolve and to be left standing in what remains.

What remains, for a Western spectator who allows the full weight of Gaza to land, is not comfortable nor will it ever be. It is the recognition that the civilization which produced you, whose values you were raised to inherit, whose institutions you were taught to trust, whose moral vocabulary you use to navigate the world itself is providing the weapons, the diplomatic protection, and the cultivated silence for something its own courts have found plausible grounds to call a genocide. It is an identity crisis of the first order. And most people, when faced with an identity crisis of the first order, look away. This is understandable. 

The looking away is not always passive. At this moment, it has been structured. The algorithmic suppression of Palestinian voices on media platforms at precisely the moments when documentation was most urgent. The professional and social penalties for naming, plainly, what is being seen. The reclassification of grief as propaganda, of a child’s name spoken aloud as some kind of threat. These are the reproduction, in modern institutional form, of an ancient communal agreement: we do not follow the goat into the wilderness. 

In the original ritual, the wilderness was the place where the suffering went so the community would not have to see it. What our platforms and our newsrooms have been quietly building for two years now is a wilderness of a different kind, a perceptual wilderness with a purposeful managed distance. It has a set of conditions under which a person can know, in some general abstract sense, what is happening, and still, at the end of the day, feel clean.

The cost of producing that feeling is borne, as it has always been, by the people in the wilderness. But there is also another less visible cost paid by everyone who accepts the arrangement. It is the cost of what you must close in yourself to sustain it. The questions you learn not to ask. The images you learn to scroll past. The names you allow to remain nameless. This is not nothing. This is, in fact, everything; what you close in yourself in order to look away is precisely the capacity that would allow you to look clearly at anything at all.

The maeaza, in Palestinian pastoral tradition, is known for something the original ritual’s architects did not anticipate: it comes back. It knows the terrain. It survives the difficult land. It finds water where other animals cannot. It returns.

James Baldwin wrote in 1979 that the Palestinians had been paying for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. He wrote it as though it were already too long. It has now been more than seventy years and over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023. This moment requires the willingness to feel what feeling clean has been costing us, and to decide whether we are willing to keep paying it, regardless of the security and inherent comfort it provides. Not for the sake of politics, but because the part of yourself you close to avoid feeling is not a part you get back easily. The world you will be left with, when the wilderness has swallowed everything it was asked to swallow, will be one you built by looking away.

Acknowledgement: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author, not necessarily Our National Conversation as a whole