My Reckoning With Betrayal

Originally published on Substack

Before I could face what my people are doing to the Palestinians, I had to face what I had done to the woman I loved.

Eight years ago, I betrayed her. I cheated. And last year, I confessed.

This is the story of what that cost me, and what opened on the other side.

When I first confessed, I only shared what I thought was enough. I told myself I was protecting her from more pain. The deeper truth is that I was protecting myself from more shame. So the confession became a process. Over weeks, more trickled out. Eventually, I disclosed everything. And with every word, I could see the deeper layers of pain I inflicted on her.

I shattered our world. Everything she thought she knew about me, our life, our love, collapsed without warning. Our story. Her safety. All of reality as she knew it. The pain I caused her is beyond what words can describe. And she had no say in any of it.

I told myself I confessed because she deserved to know the truth. And she did. She deserved to live in reality, not in a story I controlled. But I also confessed because I understood that a relationship built on hiding can only go so deep. We could not reach real intimacy, real union, when part of me was hiding. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted us to go deeper together, to grow, and to evolve our relationship. And the only chance at that was truth.

There was nothing I wouldn’t do to rebuild trust and to save our family, but I had forfeited the right to expect it.

I knew I might lose everything. And I did. But in that process, I found myself.

I didn’t cheat because I didn’t love her. I cheated because I was already living a lie, long before our relationship.

Since childhood, I believed the real me wasn’t safe to show. I performed to belong. Religiosity. Political alignment. Everything. I internalized that deviations meant rejection, that disappointment meant punishment, that love was conditional on performance. By the time we got married at twenty, my entire identity was already a mask. I didn’t know any other way to be. Hiding was how I survived.

This became the foundation of how I understood relationships. Performance. Image. Avoidance. Control.

I could not be truly intimate while hiding. So even inside the marriage, I was alone. Not because she wasn’t there. Because I wasn’t. Every day I hid, I was betraying her.

The pain of hiding compounded over time. I now know that the only way to relieve it would have been to be honest and to show up as myself, to have the hard conversations. But I was terrified that if I showed her who I really was, I would be rejected. That the marriage would end. That I would lose her and everything we built.

After I sat with what I had done, I tried to bury it. I hoped it was a nightmare I could wake up from. I told myself no one would find out. And no one did. I thought I could just move on. But shame doesn’t disappear. It festers.

I lived in constant fear that the truth would somehow come out. My body never rested. My mind tortured me.

When I held a compartment like that, I devoted enormous energy to protecting it. Part of me was always on alert. My nervous system never settled. I couldn’t truly be present in love, in work, in fatherhood while guarding the secret. So I performed being the good man, the spiritual man, the devoted partner. But I couldn’t build anything real on a foundational fracture.

I was often praying for death because dying seemed easier than telling the truth and facing what I had done.

Part of me knew the truth would collapse my entire universe. Another part knew it was the only thing that could free us. My lies had become the cage I built around both of us.

With disclosure came surrender. The image. The control. The narrative. Most of our assets. Any expectation of the outcome. So that whatever came next would come from freedom, not obligation.

The pain and grief were immense. Not just for what I lost, but for what I caused. My choices. My hiding. My betrayal. I destroyed the life we built. I broke the person I loved. I shattered my family. That was me. I had to sit with that. I let the pain move through me instead of running from it. I learned how to forgive myself without excusing myself. I had done terrible things, but those were things I did, not who I am.

Telling the truth opened something in me that hiding had kept closed. I could finally feel my own pain. I could finally be vulnerable. I could finally love deeply. And the hardest part was realizing I could no longer share it with the person I most wanted to give it to.

All of this pain, hers and mine, was a consequence of choices I made because of patterns I had never faced. I went back through years of how I had shown up. Trying to understand what it was like to experience me. Avoiding. Withholding. Controlling. Dismissing. Making decisions without honoring her. Lying and manipulating to feel safe. Abandoning myself and then abandoning her. I had to see these patterns clearly to understand why I showed up that way.

There was a part of me that wanted to defend, to explain, to say I am more than the worst things I have done. But the hardest things to hear contained truth. I had to hold it all without resistance.

I prayed every day that we could rise from the wreckage. I thought maybe if I said all the right things, gave the right things, did the right things, we could still find our way back. But surrender doesn’t come with guarantees.

Our marriage ended.

This process broke me open.

When there was nothing left to hide, I could finally be with myself. Truth restored something that years of hiding had destroyed. Integrity, self-respect, and the ability to be in my own skin. And from that place, I could actually give and receive love.

When new love eventually found me again, I was no longer in hiding. I showed her everything, and I was still loved. Not for who I had pretended to be, but for who I had become.

This kind of love does not replace what was lost or erase my past. It holds space for all of it. It didn’t arrive because I was perfectly healed. It arrived because I had finally stopped running. My heart had broken wide open and stayed open enough to receive it.

For most of my life, I was also burying the truth of what we are doing to the Palestinians.

I grew up at the center of Zionism. I was raised in a settlement in the West Bank. I know its institutions and ideology intimately. I moved through its schools, movements, and military. I believed in it completely, and I would have died for it. My identity, my belonging, my sense of self, were all built on it.

Speaking honestly about Zionism is the same painful work of confession. The same stripping bare. The same undoing.

I had to sit with Palestinian pain and resist the urge to defend my beliefs. I had to reexamine the normalization of dehumanization and oppression I witnessed. I had to see it clearly for what it was, to look at how I participated, how I justified, how I contributed without questioning it. I had to understand why I believed in it, the fear I was raised inside, the generational trauma, the indoctrination that made it all feel true and normal. I had to understand it not to excuse it, but so I could actually see the mechanism and make different choices.

I had to let go of the stories I inherited that held my reality together, that we are the only victims, the good ones just defending ourselves. Letting go meant grieving what I once believed about my people, my country, and our pain.

I had to forgive myself for participating without excusing myself. We have done terrible things. But those are things we did, not who we are. We can own it, and we can change.

I once feared being called a traitor. Losing family. Losing friends. Losing my sense of belonging. But I had already lost everything once by telling the truth, and I now know what lay on the other side.

Healing requires bringing our darkness into light. Feeling it. Looking at it. Understanding it. Integrating it. That is why I share this.

I kept these things buried for years. The secrets. The betrayals. The pain. The complicity. The shame was too heavy. The cost of speaking felt too high. The fear of what would collapse kept me silent. What I didn’t bring to light, I perpetuated. This work broke the cycles that kept me trapped.

I experienced the liberation of truth. The process felt like dying while I was still alive. And then came resurrection. On the other side, possibilities I could never have imagined began to emerge.

For love. For peace. For salvation.

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