“Do not unto others that which is hateful to you. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary” — this is the “Golden Rule” voiced by Rabbi Hillel, when asked by a prospective convert to summarise the Jewish religion “while standing on one foot”.

Hillel’s long life from his birth in Babylon to his death in Jerusalem in 10AD encouraged some to compare him with Moses. Both are believed to have lived 120 years, and for the last 40 years of his life Hillel was the leader of the Jewish people.

The comparison is relevant here because it was, of course, Moses who received the Torah on Mount Sinai, a seminal event in the Jewish tradition commemorated every year at Shavuot, the feast of weeks, seven weeks after Passover, and falling this year on May 29.

The Golden Rule was not exclusive to Hillel. Indeed the Chinese sage Confucius had expressed the same principle almost 500 years earlier: “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself.”

While the principle, then, is clearly universal rather than exclusive to a particular belief system or creed, it is no more intrinsic to human nature than wariness of difference, hatred of enemies or the instinct for revenge. To follow the Golden Rule, therefore, demands a capacity for empathy that eclipses narrow self-interest or concern merely for those close to oneself.

In the fraught Israel/Palestine conflict, the likelihood of empathising with the enemy is rare. But this was what Seth Freedman experienced. A Londoner from an orthodox background, he learned the principles of Judaism from his immediate family and his grandfather and also in the Jewish schools and religion classes he attended. After the second Intifada — Palestinian uprising — he left his job as a stockbroker to go to Israel. While he felt no special antagonism towards Palestinians, the urge to “protect my people” motivated him to volunteer for the army. After some seven months of basic training, however, when he was posted to Bethlehem and had to deal with Palestinians passing through checkpoints day after day, he grew to understand that what he was doing violated the principles he had grown up with. “You see them as people, rather than a faceless mass of ‘us and them’. It was when I had to put what I had learned in training into practice that I heard all my parents’ and teachers’ voices over my shoulders saying ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.”

Other actions soldiers routinely carried out provoked a similar response. “If you drag an older man out of his house at gunpoint, you should treat him ‘like he’s my dad’. I understood what we had to do for security but, in the bigger picture, if my dad had said ‘someone dragged me out at gunpoint’ I could imagine what an impact it would have had on me as a child. If you saw an 18-year-old doing this to your parents, it would sow rage and hatred.”

Freedman sees parallels, too, with the Jewish historical experience: “In a wider sense it’s not me dragging the man out at gunpoint, it’s the subjugating of the whole people, and when it’s been done to us, the Jewish people, in the past, those scars have never healed. But if we’re doing this now, the same thing will happen — that’s human nature.”

He derives some hope from his contact with a number of groups in Israel which aim to promote peaceful co existence with the Palestinians. One, obviously inspired by the ethical principles of Judaism such as the Golden Rule, is Rabbis for Human Rights. They encourage ordinary Israelis to help Palestinian farmers to tend their olive trees and to protect Palestinian homes when their residents are threatened with eviction. Indeed, to show solidarity, a rabbi will sometimes sleep in a Palestinian home so as to be there to confront the soldiers who come to evict the owners.

“They show Palestinians ‘people you can work with’, people who are prepared to step across the boundary and reach out to the other side, motivated by a sense of humanity,” observes Freedman, who had, himself, been invited into a Palestinian home for tea, while strolling in civilian clothes through an area he had earlier been patrolling.

It is sad to think that the laudable act of reaching out to “the other” can generate unrelenting hostility from those ostensibly on your side. But this was the reaction of the Palestinian authorities when a group of teenage musicians from the Jenin refugee camp was taken by their Israeli Arab teacher, Wafa Younis, to sing and play for a group of Holocaust survivors in Holon on the occasion of Good Deeds Day at the end of March. Younis had come to teach music to the youth in Jenin to help them overcome war trauma and the Strings of Freedom orchestra was formed three years ago. Now she has been banned from entering Jenin and the orchestra has been disbanded.

Despite this unfortunate outcome, Younis’s profoundly moving gesture of humanity across the divide provided a most valuable encounter of two groups of people, both scarred by suffering. The young Palestinians had no awareness of the Holocaust and the elderly survivors had not been informed beforehand that the musicians were Palestinians from the West Bank — and indeed descendants of those who fled their homes or were expelled in 1948, an event known to Arabs as the Naqba or catastrophe. Much goodwill was generated as the youngsters began the concert with songs of peace. Later survivors chatted with the young Palestinians and took photos together.

Younis, who dedicated a song to an Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza and also criticised Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, said her main mission was to bring people together, an aim echoed by the words of an 18-year-old keyboard player, the grandson of refugees who had been forced to flee Haifa. “Only people who have been through suffering understand each other,” he said, adding that he was shocked by what he learned about the Holocaust.

Mutual respect and understanding, as embodied in the Golden Rule, are crucial in the struggle for the Holy Land, promised to the Israelites in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt, provided that they did not indulge in the abominations of the previous inhabitants. (Leviticus xviii).

As Rabbi David Rosen, a founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, put it to me several years ago, with reference to the biblical chapter: “If we blow it, the land will spew us out.”

Emma Klein is the author of Lost Jews

Rabbis for Human Rights