The Suffering Beyond Our Horizon

It must be said bluntly – a genocide has been going on in Palestine. Already destitute lives are destroyed by bombs. Innocent children are getting their short lives brutally ended, while wailing women are blown to pieces with tears in their eyes. There is currently no peace and no hope for the Palestinian people.

Yet, in the West we live on as if this reality didn’t exist. We were taught “Never again”, but “Never again is now”.

Was it just a mantra, something we learned by heart but never took seriously? We told ourselves that we would have acted, protested – against our immoral governments - if we had been alive during the “darkest hour”. We were convinced that we would never have been as passive as those people we saw on grainy black and white film.

Yet, here we are facing the on-going genocide of the Palestinians, and the war crimes against the Lebanese. Maybe we understand in our guts that we should scream and dissent - but we don’t. We turn our attention away and carry on with our lives and our loves. (But not all of us, it must be said.)

“Genocide” sounds foreign – yes, that is the reason, we could tell ourselves. Does the Greek root muffle our feelings of compassion towards its victims? But then, why do most Germans not passionately condemn their government for so shamelessly supporting Israel, when the German word for genocide is the powerful and heart-wrenching word “Völkermord”. The murder of a people.

At least we can console ourselves that this lack of empathy is not uniquely Western. As human beings, we simply do not care much when something does not touch our own little world. Our empathy to events cools as our distance to them increases; geographically, but also temporally and culturally. Santayana wrote: “We dislike to trample on a flower, because its form makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancy which we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we endured in childhood and feel no tremor at the incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond our horizon, because no imitable image is involved to start a contrite thrill in our own bosom.”

Herein lies an important truth of mankind. Our lack of empathy for the suffering beyond our horizon is natural and human. Such empathy can only be spring from within ourselves by a mindful effort.

This indifference to the pain and suffering inflicted far away by man on man should shock us, or at least lead us to introspection. But we are indifferent even to our indifference. We can justify this in many ways, for instance by saying that we cannot imagine what is really happening over there. As Nietzsche said, “the great lack of fantasy from which we suffer keeps us from being able to empathize with other beings.”

We also justify our position by telling ourselves that we have transferred both our power to act and our sense of responsibility to our political representatives, simply by slipping a ballot in a box. And we say our lack of compassion towards the suffering of the Palestinian people is due to our not having seen that harrowing “imitable image”. Indeed, if we want to avoid being exposed, mainstream media certainly helps us. Sometimes we avoid looking at the images to avoid being confronted with our human nature.

In psychology, in cognitive behavioral therapy, phobias or anxieties are sometimes treated with exposure. The more we expose ourselves to our fears, for example our fear of spiders or our fear of public speaking, the more we are desensitized to them. By watching photos and films of our irrational fears, we can overcome them. After the initial shock, we get used to distressing impressions and become stronger. This process of desensitizing through exposure must be done gently, in stages.

In Palestine and Lebanon, the Israeli army seems to use a similar process of exposure. They expose the world to small amounts of their violence, in order to slowly make even genocide acceptable over time. The Israeli population has long ago been desensitized; its majority has no compassion for the Palestinians. The Zionist regime is now desensitizing the entire world to their genocide through slow exposure.

At first, a few Palestinians were killed, then a building was a destroyed, then an entire neighborhood. And then, when we were appropriately desensitized, they bombed refugee camps, and we did not react. In Lebanon in the beginning, there was just a “surgical” strike in a poor Beirut neighborhood where they told us people had been evacuated for their safety. We told ourselves that at least human life was spared. Then, when we were appropriately desensitized, entire villages with their churches were wiped out in front of our eyes. And we hardly flinched.

Though we can improve our attitudes to life, we cannot change our human nature. This nature lets us feel relative love and beauty in the smallest of things, but it also affirms a relative indifference and insensitivity towards the suffering of mankind beyond our horizon. The violations of international law committed not only this year but for decades by Israel in the Levant, and by other governments elsewhere, should serve as a reminder that to improve the world and to solve problems peacefully, it is futile to expect a change to human nature. Instead, it is necessary to reduce the power of states and fight for freedom in the world.