Weapons of Rage Are Fed With the Ammunition of Suffering

During my visit to a refugee camp in the jungles at the Thai-Burma border last year, a Burmese refugee leader related to me an important lesson he learned from the Palestinians: You can’t let life become comfortable for your people, he said, or they’ll give up the struggle. There’s little chance that life will become excessively easy for Palestinians today. Still, the Burmese leader was on to something. Suffering is the fuel of the fighting in the Middle East, on both sides of the conflict.

The Palestinians are desperate from life under occupation. What else can they do, goes the standard explanation, but resort to terrorism? The Israelis are desperate after the slaughter inflicted upon them by terrorists. What else can they do, they say, but respond with an iron fist? The Palestinians have endured life with the indignities of Israel’s occupation for decades. The Israelis have lived under the threat of destruction by their Arab neighbors for longer. Who’s angrier? Who’s more determined? Who has suffered more?

In the poisoned well of the Middle East, suffering is the magic potion that invigorates. Israel was built on the ashes of the Holocaust. “Never again” became the mantra of survival. After European anti-Semitism nearly succeeded in exterminating the Jewish people, the Jews of Israel pledged they would never again allow anti-Jewish hatred to develop into a machine of death. Every memory of the 6 million killed in Nazi death camps became a weapon of protection against the new threat from Arab countries repeatedly vowing to wipe Israel off the map.

All the while, most of the Palestinian people lived in misery under Israeli rule or as refugees in Arab countries, trapped between Israel’s “never again” creed and the bluster of Arab dictators who exploited the refugees’ living condition to divert attention from their own tyrannical rule. No one, really, worked to improve the lives of Palestinians, and both sides, Arabs and Israelis, unwittingly conspired to stoke the embers of their rage.

Israel may have the most powerful military arsenal in the region, but the weapon of choice in the Middle East is rage--loaded with the ammunition of suffering. Sadly, every salvo from this weapon provides the other side with ammunition. Every suicide bombing energizes Israel’s determination. Every military incursion gives the Palestinians a rallying cry to hit again.

The cycle is made even worse by the strategic thinking, on both sides, that the unacceptable policies of the enemy should not be rewarded with compromise.

The manipulation of suffering is nothing new. Yugoslavia’s war of self-destruction was built on reminiscence of horrors past. Slobodan Milosevic climbed to the top of the Serbian political world by visiting the site of the Serbs’ great defeat at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman Muslims in 1389. The Serbs recounted in gruesome detail what the Croats, as Nazi allies, did to them, and the Croats and Muslims armed themselves with the suffering brought on by the horrors committed by the new Serbs.

But when it comes to suffering, nobody can top the Middle East. Any Jew will tell you that no people have suffered like the Jewish people. But the Palestinians will be quick to point out that they are the ones suffering more today. Who’s keeping count? Everyone is.

It’s not easy to win a war fought with suffering and rage. The price is too high. It’s even harder to stop this kind of war. It requires leaders with almost superhuman qualities. Not the kind who make sure their people’s lives are difficult enough that they won’t give up the struggle. It requires Mandelas, Ghandis, visionaries and statesmen. It takes men or women who can rise above human emotion to lead their people away from purely emotional reactions. Individuals like that are obviously not in charge today anywhere in the region. Perhaps they are somewhere, quietly pondering what is to be done. In the meantime, each side will continue to arm itself with rage, and punish the other with its sorrow.