Suffering alone does not make people humane. It doesn't always teach wisdom.
My father was oppressed at a time. What he endured did not stop him from becoming a source of suffering himself to say the least.
My mother, wounded and molded by him, passed plenty of that on to her children and me espacially.
All throughout my life I recognized the same tragic patterns far beyond my own home, among people who remembered persecution, colonialism , imperialism..yet showed little mercy to those unlike themselves; among Muslim communities that held into the memory of subjugation while reproducing its logic in the present; among Arabs , among Africans, among Imazighan..
And Israelis are no different, always reminding me that history grants no immunity against moral failure.
I see victims who become the cruelest of oppressors..and oppressors who were never true victims.
We have all witnessed how they inherit the mantle of victimhood. They latch into the grief of their fathers, the fears of their mothers, the humiliations of distant generations and neighbors, of people on screens, until borrowed sufferings become part of their identity.
Until memories ,which could have been a source of wisdom, harden into entitlement and cruelty.
Until suffering, which could have opened the heart, becomes a license to silence its beats.
And so I very much feel and suspect that the true divide among us isn't really between victims and oppressors, or the powerful and the weak.
The west and the east ..
It is between our ability to transform our pain, our inner narratives , into empathy , and our ability to use it all as permission to discard our own humanity.
That's the divide.
I have also came to embrace the fact that we humans oppress ourselves long before we move to oppressing otherness.
A person gives up their best values , sacrifices them for a sense of belonging, a sense of unity or identity built on rage, until little is left of his inner childhood. Piece by piece .. oppression starts there and moves outward.
It is much more than a power dynamic. It is a collection of interelated dynamics some of which come from weakness disguised as power, or power disguised as weakness, or both.
My mother, wounded and molded by him, passed plenty of that on to her children and me espacially.
All throughout my life I recognized the same tragic patterns far beyond my own home, among people who remembered persecution, colonialism , imperialism..yet showed little mercy to those unlike themselves; among Muslim communities that held into the memory of subjugation while reproducing its logic in the present; among Arabs , among Africans, among Imazighan..
And Israelis are no different, always reminding me that history grants no immunity against moral failure.
I see victims who become the cruelest of oppressors..and oppressors who were never true victims.
We have all witnessed how they inherit the mantle of victimhood. They latch into the grief of their fathers, the fears of their mothers, the humiliations of distant generations and neighbors, of people on screens, until borrowed sufferings become part of their identity.
Until memories ,which could have been a source of wisdom, harden into entitlement and cruelty.
Until suffering, which could have opened the heart, becomes a license to silence its beats.
And so I very much feel and suspect that the true divide among us isn't really between victims and oppressors, or the powerful and the weak.
The west and the east ..
It is between our ability to transform our pain, our inner narratives , into empathy , and our ability to use it all as permission to discard our own humanity.
That's the divide.
I have also came to embrace the fact that we humans oppress ourselves long before we move to oppressing otherness.
A person gives up their best values , sacrifices them for a sense of belonging, a sense of unity or identity built on rage, until little is left of his inner childhood. Piece by piece .. oppression starts there and moves outward.
It is much more than a power dynamic. It is a collection of interelated dynamics some of which come from weakness disguised as power, or power disguised as weakness, or both.
