On September 9th, 1993, the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, received a letter from Yasser Arafat in which the Palestinian leader renounced violence and officially recognised Israel. Rabin replied later that day, officially recognising the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This was not easy for either leader – just two months before, Rabin had ordered a one-week military operation in Lebanon, in response to Hizbullah rocket fire into Israel.

Violence begets violence and cruelty begets cruelty. Fear creates the emotional triggers for our most primitive impulses – for punishing, causing pain and exacting revenge. In a state of fear, the brain’s emotion centres, such as the amygdala, go into overdrive and disrupt rational and long-term thinking. A part of the brain which was the last to evolve in humans as a species, and which is the last to complete its development in our mid to late 20s – the prefrontal cortex – is the only antidote to vengeful emotion. This part of the brain can, with great effort and over time, send inhibiting messages down to these emotion centres and tone them down. This changes brain chemistry to allow these more rational, strategic and long-term thinking parts of the brain to operate properly again. Statesmen such as Rabin are human civilisation’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex. Yes, they feel the rage, the fear and the impulse for revenge, but they master them. And by doing so they are able to look into the future and see only a ghastly ping-pong of violence stretching endlessly ahead; they understand that there must be another way, albeit........

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