Model Weeping

Why Do They Weep?

The question has plagued me for quite sometime. What is it exactly that makes the Palestinian suffering unique? I had seen suffering operating in all forms laced throughout the world. As one’s experience is invariably relative, I inadvertently began juxtaposing my perceptions of people’s suffering in afflicted areas with others. This naturally began with the geographical mass most notoriously known to internalize pain – sub-Saharan Africa. It was later compared with other areas devastated by issues ranging from poverty, crime and disease to natural disaster and anthropogenic catastrophes…

The most remarkable suffering seemed to materialize not from pre-disposed or endemic conditions, but instead, those generated by mankind. Of course, most of these phenomena were preceded by undesirable conditions as well. However, I did not envisage the most concentrated suffering in areas suffering from natural shortages. Instead, this occurred more often in areas devastated by unequal divides and the powers that induced these inequalities. This was a curious observation, because most of us reared in the West hold on so tightly and depend so greatly on our aspects of materialism and technology that we cannot perceive a world without them. Clearly, however, these comforts would be worthless to us if we were never exposed to them to begin with…

Prior to arriving in the Middle East, I had circumnavigated all corners of the globe. I had witnessed an uncountable amount of suffering – and it subsequently altered my comfortable Western perspective. Upon exposure, I began to travel a different route and all aspects of familiarity, social parameters, and ideological priorities kept mutating. I saw famines and infectious diseases operating on monumental levels…

Yet none of this suffering struck me as hard as the child in South Africa dying from a viral grim reaper that never gave her the opportunity to cognitively love – mostly because the government at the time refused to cover the cost of an HIV/AIDS preventative medication that was placed out of the reach of the population by the pharmaceutical industry. None touched me so much as the 12 year-old Port-Au-Prince slum-thriving AIDS-plagued Haitian boy created by the hands of the infamous sex tour route for wealthy Americans. None deprived me of so much sleep as the 14 year-old Bombay beauty sold into sex slavery to fund the cost of her 3 older sisters’ dowries.

Why was this exactly? Why were these circumstances so much more unbearable than the ones causing edema-induced potbellies amongst wide-eyed children saturating the screens of our beloved Christian charity infomercials? Once I began to analyze these forms of human tragedy – I started noticing an irreducible trend. All of these people, these breathing, smiling, aching, once innocent, heart-warming children were suffering at the hands of other humans. It wasn’t the conditions that emanated from natural states or even absolute poverty that caused them to inordinately suffer. It was the circumstances generated by the atrocious human traits profusely recorded in most theological narratives.

Anyone who grasps the ability to listen or read in today’s world is all too familiar with the problem benignly dubbed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This conundrum dominates our dinner tables and break rooms. At the same time, however, so many of us fail to fully understand the intricacies of this energy-consuming nightmare. I was one…

Therefore, upon arriving, I quickly began absorbing everything around me. My alacrity to learn the history, perspectives and sociopolitical conditions was matched by the massive wealth of information available. Yet my baseline ignorance was soon supplanted by the unknowns and curiosities that emerge due to erudite knowledge. I decided I needed more. I needed to reify these abstract statistics and historical narratives with irreplaceable reality. I would soon enter that “bomb-ridden, terrorist-proliferating” forbidden land that us Westerners only read about in our suspense novels or Hollywood blockbuster films. I was on my way to the occupied Palestinian Territories…

Prior to arrival, based upon the disproportionate amount of attention focusing on this geographical area smaller than Los Angeles county, I expected to encounter sheer unequivocal hell. I anticipated the antithesis of pure joy and wellbeing. However, how could conditions deteriorate that much further beyond those I had encountered in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America or South Asia? I naturally assumed they could, as media coverage is theoretically proportional with such tragedy and suffering. Oddly enough, this socially constructed fear and anxiety was soon met by stunning geographical landscaping, lush vegetation, reasonable infrastructures, a paucity of superficial infections and diseases, and well-fed stomachs. How could this possibly be?

Upon my repeated excursions into the West Bank, I began noticing something entirely divergent from my experiences in other developing nations. I started to acknowledge populations seemingly void of emotion. This was new to me. One of the heartwarming aspects of working in least developed countries was the prevalence of warmth, gratitude and appreciation targeted towards the outsider. Indeed, despite the disproportional poverty, famine, presence of triadic pandemics, desperate acts of violence, and sociopolitical volatility existent in myriad developing parts of the world, many of these people are so enthralled by witnessing the “white man spectacle”…

Vernacular couldn’t even begin to elucidate this seemingly antithetical reality. There is so much vibrancy to be found in these areas of civilized infancy, uncensored by the metaphorical barriers that our obedient society so faithfully lives under. Their culture – deep, enriching and entrancing – is personified in all of their actions. And the experience of witnessing this manifestation, this ongoing celebration of life, is nothing less than spectacular…

However, Palestine did not resemble any other area that I had traveled to before. Was it possible that these people were inherently cold and apathetic? After traveling to and subsequently researching several other parts of the Arabic world – it became inordinately clear that this was a cultural impossibility. Nevertheless, my observations were persistent and accurate – they were suffering from a pain undetectable by the prototypical differential diagnosis. The Palestinians did not seem to reproduce the knee-jerk laughter, amazement and playful mocking of our awkward Western ways. After marinating on the etiology of their discernable malaise, my conjecture invariably landed on one specific source of pain – systematic oppression…

Subsequently, I argue that the Palestinian suffering is not rooted in the traditional forms of poverty and disease. Instead, it is the direct result of the daily oppression enforced upon them by their Israeli occupation in conjunction with the indirect result of two other factors. The proliferation of unplanned checkpoints, the repeated taunting by their Jewish settler neighbors, their inability to lead reliable and fulfilling existences all converge upon a suffering that is not experienced in most other parts of the globe…

Of course, the world is overrun by brutal sociopolitical and structural violence, but I argue that three significant components cause a divergence in outcomes. First, the majority of other forms of government or insurgency-led oppression are facilitated by members of the same or similar national, ethnic, religious or racial group. I argue that the more features that differentiate between two groups – the oppressors and their subjugated prey – the more their shared ideologies will rupture, the more resistant the marginalized group shall be, the more detrimental too shall be their consequences…

Second, most other domination manifests either in subtle, undetectable and persistent forms (i.e. structural violence) or random and transient varieties. Therefore, the seemingly infinite formalized and structured oppression of the Palestinian is internalized differently – as a barrier to hope, dreams and a realistic future. A university education cannot be properly sought after, a family cannot be appropriately planned for, a life cannot be organized if hope is an abstract concept.

If these restrictions on natural liberties do not seem to fade with time; if the strong Arabic pride is denigrated by children watching their mothers bear children or sisters die of acute trauma at military checkpoints; if no matter how much resistance and infighting persists nothing positive ever seems to materialize – these people are gradually drained of the life that causes the human condition to subsist.

These two factors mentioned thus far resonate well with the conditions observed under the Apartheid regime in South Africa. But why? Why attempt to whip the non-conformist into absolute docility? I argue that the inclination to create such human dynamics emanates from a general culture of fear that we all live in. Aung San Suu Kyi stated that “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” Curiously enough, prolific infectious disease and relative poverty still abound in South Africa, yet the element of human suffering has inarguably declined since 1994 and the dissolution of the oppressive Apartheid state…

Third, I argue that although debate is a general catalyst to maintaining dialogue, sharpening ideas and attaining mutually agreeable solutions – the Israel-Palestine debate has actually had the reverse effect. The flurry of conflicting ideas and hostile animosities has effectively blocked the respiratory passage of the Israel-Palestine peace process. The more global media attention is narrowed in on an unnecessarily complex dispute, the more obfuscation is created, the less pragmatic ideas are able to fluently float through this passage. Moreover, people entrenched in this quelling of ideas seem to adore blaming such an impasse on “history” without setting their sights on present and future resolutions…

What benefit could this possibly produce for either side? The U.S.-Israeli lobby appears to employ such suffocating tactics in order to obscure a very simple strategy of Palestinian oppression and violation of human rights. Whether or not this quells further violence and terrorist acts from emerging in either the occupied Palestinian territories or Israel proper goes beyond the scope of this treatise, as I am solely analyzing the root of Palestinian suffering. This way, Israel is able to evade the actual issues involved and retain much of their post-1967 borders (minus Sinai). On the other hand, the Arab camp applies this smokescreen in order to reap international sympathy to further validate their quest to resist Western domination…

The end result of this overshadowing is an exorbitant amount of confused international observers hopelessly siding with their respective philosophical basecamps – with complete disregard for the actual record involved. This seems like an ideal arrangement for all involved parties, save one – the Palestinian. The more they scream, the more the Israeli chalks them up to be savage barbarians…the more the Arab sketches them as innocent suffering children deprived of their homeland…the louder they scream…the more hopeless and apathetic they inevitably become….

Human systematic oppression is a denial of physical freedom. From empirical research, the obstruction of this basic entitlement seems to be the most potent catalyst to achieve human suffering. This epitomizes anthropogenic destruction and is frequently conjoined with two other indirect factors creating quintessential suffering – extreme poverty and relative misery…

Absolute poverty is the number of people living below a certain income threshold or the number of households unable to afford certain basic goods and services. Extreme poverty is clearly the most severe state, where people cannot meet the basic needs for survival (i.e. food, potable water, shelter, education, etc.). The World Bank has set the criterion for such to be those living on less than $1/day. Approximately 1.2 billion live under such atrocious conditions – 2.8 billion have a daily income of less than $2.

Extreme poverty is not due to a lack of natural resources available, but instead is the acute result of human greed and oppression conjoined by foreign encroachment and exploitation. A country with homogenous poverty is tragic – but morally digestible. What is downright morally repugnant, however, is when a relative amount of wealth exists, but is hoarded by a select few. Let us than say that an association exists between greed and moral degradation. Indeed, Gandhi purported that “…the world has enough for man’s need…but not enough for man’s greed.”

An additional variant of poverty exists which has a significantly wider array of social ramifications – relative poverty. It may be defined by reference to the living standards of the majority in any given society. More specifically, it describes a person as poor – in direct comparison to other members of their society. Therefore, if the vast majority of these people have access to particular resources; the minority who are excluded from these goods and services on financial grounds may be said to be living in relative poverty…

Therefore, the real underlying drive that induces suffering is not absolute poverty – but economic inequality. It is not the fact that one is lacking, but the acknowledgement that another is thriving at the expense of their less fortunate counterpart. Therefore, it seems relative poverty is most significant when considering the motives for violence, and crime in general. Terrorism is an extension of crime on a nationalist scale. It is grounded in hopelessness and frustration as well as a lack of access to fundamental resources and fed with a modicum of religious fervor…

The social etiology of violence may be more appropriately attributed to what Link and Phelan refer to as the “fundamental causes” model. This theory stipulates that people will be “at (greater) risk of risks” if they are living in more unequal societies and located at the bottom of these respective social gradients…

These “fundamental causes” are class, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Examples may include knowledge (i.e. education), finances (i.e. income), power, prestige, and social connections (i.e. capital) that determine the extent to which people are able to avoid risks for relative poverty, crime and terrorism…

Therefore, we may speculate that a higher income inequality translates into a greater incidence of relative poverty. This relative poverty than bleeds into lower social prosperity, which leads to higher rates of crime and terrorism. Case in point, economic prosperity almost invariably enhances the incidence of crime in the form of more goods and services to steal from and internalize resentment over.

Therefore, this suspected “good” merely contributes to the presence of chaos. In fact, crime is least likely to be a serious dilemma in a society that is economically challenged and subject to restrictive behavioral restraints. Cuba is a perfect example with a relatively non-existent crime rate.

On the other hand, in modern urbanized societies (e.g. Israel), in which economic growth and individual success are imperative values, there is little reason to assume that crime and terrorism will not continue to elevate on the other side of the income divide (e.g. Palestine). When you juxtapose an infant mortality rate of 24.45 deaths/1,000 live births (Palestine) and 6.89 deaths/1,000 live births (Israel) in conjunction with a GDP per capita of $24,600 (Israel) and $1,100 (Palestine), it becomes clear that the average Palestinian wonders why their lighter-skinned Ashkenazi neighbor is 25 times richer than they…

Psychosocial environmental factors affect perceptions of place in the social hierarchy. If I am on the same aircraft with a man who is stretching out his feet while being served champagne and filet mignon; while I am cramped in between two obese people with screaming children buzzing around me, while consuming something that vaguely resembles fried chicken – the question may arise: why is he better than me? Adam Smith offered us a similar analogy centuries ago, where the lack of a linen shirt and leather shoes in Victorian England translated into relative deprivation of being fully integrated into society – i.e. social exclusion…

This relative deprivation may lead to frustration, social conflict, diluted social capital and cohesion, and finally – perceived and absolute discrimination. Paradoxically, many social changes that are perceived as progress may, in essence, achieve counterproductive ends – thus instigating a higher incidence of crime and terrorism.

In conclusion, massive and incessant human suffering need not exist amidst the relative abundance of resources and technological proficiency that we possess in today’s world. Yet it does. Jeffrey Sachs points out that the world’s 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth between 1994 and 1998 – to more than $1 trillion. The assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all 43 least developed countries and their 600 million people. Furthermore, the distance between the richest and poorest countries was 3:1 in 1820, 35:1 in 1950 and 72:1 in 1992…

The fact that nine out of ten scientists and engineers who have ever worked on this planet are alive today further demonstrates that the fabric of human society has and continues to fail. Encapsulating these figures, approximately 20% of the world’s population possesses 80% of the world’s wealth, so while some people enjoy a high standard of living – many others live in abject poverty and manifest misery unable to satisfy even the most basic needs…

Human anguish is tragic at every level. From my observations, however, human suffering is most acute when materializing from three man-made conditions: systematic oppression by a group significantly different than the majority, relative poverty and its most profound extension – extreme poverty. All three seem to coexist within the same algorithm that perpetuates the desirable conditions and wealth of the status quo. This is at the direct expense of others. And this theoretical concept is personified by the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Authority.

While it is understandable that the Israeli government take several precautions to ensure the safety of their citizens, it is my strong belief that they not assume that the present Israel-Palestine dynamics can subsist much longer. This fault lay not solely on their shoulders – but also rests upon the combined weight of the current key players of the Arabic world as well as the Palestinian administration. The Palestinian will continue to ail and subsequently harm others most extraordinarily until an alternative arrangement is implemented…

If the Israeli, Arab and Palestinian governments care anything for ameliorating flagrant human pain – it behooves them to address these three underlying fundamental causes. It is essential for the international community to place insurmountable pressure on achieving this resolution of peaceful coexistence as they did in South Africa without the obfuscation of the clear and concise record of events…

Most parties involved have suffered similar torment in the past. George K. Anderson accurately coined this peculiar and illogical condition by stating “What man has done to man is the saddest chapter in the history of the world. The story of the peoples of the earth is in large measure the tale of how the world whipped the nonconformist with its displeasure and visited upon him dishonor and ignominy, torture and death.” It is high time we wipe the tears of anthropogenic human suffering by drawing from lessons in the past and applying them to solutions in the future…

About the Author

Tyler B.Evans, MPH earned his Bachelor of Science
degree in Gerontology from the University of Southern California; and Master of Public Health degree in SocioMedical Sciences/History & Ethics from Columbia University Mailman School of Public
Health. He is currently a medical student at Tel Aviv University/Sackler Faculty of Medicine. He has extensive experience in the field of HIV/AIDS, human rights advocacy, and medical humanitarianism in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Middle east and Asia—working with Doctors without Borders, Physicians for Human Rights, UNICEF, as well as various non-governmental organizations. He currently resides in Tel Aviv, Israel and can be contacted at te2105@columbia.edu.

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