After 9/11, we were all Americans. After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo atrocity, “Je suis Charlie.” When Boko Haram kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, the world wanted to #BringBackOurGirls. But Israel? That’s different.
There have, it’s true, been a few vigils, but participation has been sparse, especially from non-Jews. Very different from the massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the Arab world, Europe, and the Anglosphere.
BIDEN HAILS THIRD QUARTER GDP GROWTH AS 'BIDENOMICS' TRIUMPH
This is not a column about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a matter on which good people can sincerely disagree. It’s about the peculiar lack of empathy that sets the murder of 1,400 Israelis apart from previous terrorist attacks.
It should be possible to support an independent Palestine with east Jerusalem as its capital while recoiling in uncomplicated horror from the murder of children. It should be possible to be a devout Muslim who seeks unconstrained sovereignty over the Al-Aqsa Mosque while regarding Hamas as blasphemers against their professed faith. Indeed, it is hard to see how a devout Muslim could believe otherwise. Islamic jurisprudence on the conduct of war is based on the rules laid down by the first caliph, Abu Bakr, which prohibit, among other things, the killing of women, children, and old men and the mutilation of bodies.
How are we to explain this unique lack of sympathy with terrorist victims? Why did activists and governments around the world immediately call for a ceasefire that would leave Hamas holding both its hostages and its weaponry? I can’t remember anyone calling for a ceasefire with al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Why, come to that, were people protesting even before there had been an Israeli response? What kind of warped mindset do you need to rip down posters of kidnapped children?
The answers lie in what psychologists mean when they say “agents and patients.” We tend to divide the world into those who do things and those to whom things are done — “who, whom,” as Lenin pithily summarized it. This tendency is by no means confined to one side of politics. You do not respond to a child hitting a banker as you do to a banker hitting a child, regardless of who started it or who was provoked. Your response is conditioned by a deeper instinct.
That instinct has been turned into the ruling principle of our age, especially where questions of race are concerned. Under the strange taxonomy of the decolonization movement, Israelis count as agents (white and Western), while Palestinians count as patients (brown and oppressed). For people who are conditioned to see the world as a pyramid of privilege, it is very difficult to sympathize with anyone in the designated oppressor group — even children.
Most human societies down the centuries have divided the world into in-groups and out-groups, us and them. All manner of things that are intolerable within the tribe are excused when directed outward, including rape, murder, and, yes, the taking of children.
Tribes were originally defined by consanguinity. Then, they were widened to include religious and national affinities. Now, they have to do degrees of victimhood, which is why supporters of Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and so on tend automatically to side with designated victim groups — in this case, the Palestinians.
Thus, two groups of people watch two sets of media, mourn two sets of children, and rage at two sets of killers. The Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom points out that we naturally empathize with those who are like us. It would be odd if Arabs were not more drawn to people who share their language, dress, and faith. Most Westerners do something similar. The murdered and abducted Israeli children remind us of our own, with their Harry Potter costumes and their Xboxes.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Bloom goes on to argue that, for precisely this reason, empathy is a very poor moral guide, being arbitrary and innumerate. We end up caring more about a single suffering child whom we can see than about hundreds whom we can’t. More than once, following the news over the past week, I have found myself weeping over an image of a kidnapped Israeli child that triggers some association in my memory. I have to keep telling myself that the Palestinian children in Gaza whose pictures I am not constantly seeing are just as much the center of their parents’ lives.
Some people, consuming different media, are seeing only the Palestinian children in Gaza. And some of those, unwilling to look beyond the “agents and patients” categorization, feel empathy only one way. Having determined their out-group, they struggle to relate to its members as individual human beings. That is their tragedy. It is Israel’s, too.
Why so many struggle to empathize with Israel
3
0
30.10.2023
After 9/11, we were all Americans. After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo atrocity, “Je suis Charlie.” When Boko Haram kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, the world wanted to #BringBackOurGirls. But Israel? That’s different.
There have, it’s true, been a few vigils, but participation has been sparse, especially from non-Jews. Very different from the massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the Arab world, Europe, and the Anglosphere.
BIDEN HAILS THIRD QUARTER GDP GROWTH AS 'BIDENOMICS' TRIUMPH
This is not a column about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a matter on which good people can sincerely disagree. It’s about the peculiar lack of empathy that sets the murder of 1,400 Israelis apart from previous terrorist attacks.
It should be possible to support an independent Palestine with east Jerusalem as its capital while recoiling in uncomplicated horror from the murder of children. It should be possible to be a devout Muslim who seeks unconstrained sovereignty over the Al-Aqsa Mosque while regarding Hamas as blasphemers against their professed faith. Indeed, it is hard to see how a devout Muslim could believe otherwise.........
© Washington Examiner
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
