The Moralization of Suffering: Trauma and Authority in Israel and Palestine

Monday Memo: 3/30 AD 2026

The land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea is contested between two traumatic histories.

Although Israel exercises sovereign control over most of the Holy Land, the status of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem remains disputed. Two rival Arab Palestinian groups—the Palestinian National Authority and Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas)—also contest the territory.

Governments will have to solve this dispute; however, political agency on both sides is currently frozen. We are talking about two peoples, not simply two governments. Eventually, Palestinians will need a unified administration to speak for them, which will require elections. No longer can a group like Hamas be permitted to drag two million people into a war with no mandate to do so. Yet, no one knows when the Palestinian people will next choose their leaders; there has been no election for the Palestinian Legislative Council, their parliament, since 2006. Israel, for its part, is scheduled to hold an election this year, and the polls are split between pro- and anti-Netanyahu factions. In both cases, peace depends on the citizens empowering leaders willing and able to end the conflict on terms both national communities can live with.

But how do the people recognize what they can and should be willing to live with, and which of their desires asks for too much? If peacemaking is to involve the American people, efforts cannot focus only on governments and fighters. Diplomacy must take place within civil society. This is what we call Track II diplomacy.

Track II diplomacy is the “back-channel”—the informal contact between individuals who do not officially represent governments but often have contact with those in authority. Unlike Track I, which involves formal negotiations between heads of state or high-level diplomats, Track II brings together academics, retired officials, community leaders, and NGOs: the folks on the street. In today’s bitterest conflicts, the civilian-to-civilian contacts and outreach are often when and where societies figure out whether they really want peace or would rather keep killing each other. The job of private conflict resolution efforts is not to sign a treaty but to build a bridge that a population is willing to cross to sign that treaty. For peace to last, the culture of longtime enemies must be reoriented; they must see the other as a permanent neighbor, free to live as they choose without the need to control, dominate, or displace.

One book I often recommend to students is The Culture of Defeat by the late German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He explored what happens to societies after military defeat—not just politically, but emotionally and culturally. Applying Schivelbusch’s ideas to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can help explain how both sides interpret loss and victimhood, and how those narratives shape their identities. His central idea was that defeated nations may not simply accept loss. Instead, they might reframe it into a story of moral superiority against their opponent or project it forward, viewing their present and future through the lens of their loss.

For Palestinians, the Nakba (catastrophe) marks the defining rupture of 1948, when hundreds of thousands were displaced in the creation of Israel during the First Arab-Israeli War. What began as dispossession became a collective wound. Within Schivelbusch’s framework, the Nakba is a constituting myth—one that gives moral coherence to a people without sovereignty. Out of loss, Palestinians have fashioned a vocabulary of endurance: sumud, or steadfastness; the refusal to vanish; the insistence that exile is not erasure. Their unique national political consciousness was born here and their mindsets have been captured by the shared trauma.

Across decades of occupation and diaspora, Palestinian art and politics have made the catastrophe a symbol of survival. Like the defeated societies Schivelbusch studied—the American South after the Civil War or Germany after the First World War—Palestinians transformed defeat into a claim of moral strength. Their poetry, marches, and uprisings recast exile as testimony. Out of ruins a national culture grew, sustained by grief but oriented toward endurance.

Yet the same stories that preserve a people can also imprison them. Schivelbusch warned that cultures of defeat may harden into nostalgia, binding societies to grievance. For Palestinians, devotion to the lost homeland is both a lifeline and a constraint—a sacred inheritance that makes attempts at reconciliation with the dispossessors feel like betrayal. The Nakba remains the emotional core of Palestinian identity, a nation defined by what it remembers about 1948 and the Six Day War of 1967.

Though Israel today holds military superiority, its national imagination remains haunted by vulnerability. From the Holocaust to the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israeli identity has been shaped by the memory of near-extinction. Even triumphant nations can live within the mental and emotional walls of past defeats. They do not simply remember them; they organize their politics around them.

If “Never Again” is the mantra, what is not justifiable to ensure it remains true?

In Israel’s case, this takes the form of a civic creed built on survival. The nation tells itself a story of endurance under siege—of a new state created in 1948 and rescued from annihilation only by their own vigilance. Abandoned by the world to a genocide, they feel the only people they can trust are themselves, and their own power. The memory of absolute vulnerability can create a psychic need for absolute security, requiring the absolute insecurity of their opponents. Each concession, even to a much weaker adversary, feels dangerous.

The result is a paradox of power. A state born from trauma wields unmatched strength yet continues to imagine itself on the brink. Its dominance is shadowed by dread. Israel’s fierce insistence on defense is emotional and existential—an act of preemption against a memory of mass atrocity that may not match current reality. Both Israelis and Palestinians draw legitimacy from their wounds. Each community sees itself as history’s injured party—the survivor of betrayal, persecution, or dispossession.

A symmetrical victimhood.

This is the moralization of suffering.

The American conscience cannot bear the sins of others’ conflicts. We are war-weary, not isolationist. To provide more than mere summits, Americans must help these peoples imagine mutual justice without surrendering dignity. They must overcome their deadlock of identity. Peace must recognize the reality of power while insisting on the reality of wrongs and the need for redress. That means a future where two states are both sovereign and secure—in their rights of self-defense and internal police—and both societies can live with that reality.

Photo by Zaur Ibrahimov on Unsplash