What the Palestine conflict says about human nature

livemint.com:

fire, writes Rutger Bregman in his book, Humankind: A Hopeful History. They even pretended to fire, and reload, to appease their superiors. The latest phase in the Israel-Palestine conflict is uniquely brutal for Israel, and brutal in a very familiar way for Palestinians.

At first glance, it makes us lose hope in humanity, in our most important hypothesis that there is some point in human life, that we may not exactly know what that point is, but it somehow involves our revulsion for barbarity. But we just need to look more carefully at the world’s desperate attempts to persuade Israel to realize what it already knows, that “revenge is a lazy form of grief," as a character says in the film The Interpreter. Most people attach a high value to human life, including that of people they despise.

I do not say this makes us safer. In fact, this makes us unsafe. In a world where most people are incapable of killing, a few demented people can be highly efficient at it.

I only say that there is hope because peace appears to be natural to humans. Maybe it is not as ancient as humans, maybe it is not a primordial thing, but it is now at the heart of all modern human societies. This is also the reason why Palestine’s public relations always trumps Israel’s.

Even though over 1,000 Jews were massacred, some of them brutally, the moral high ground shifted from Israel in just a day—to Palestinian Arabs. This is because consciously and unconsciously the world wants to protect Palestinians from Israeli vengeance. Consciously and unconsciously, they can see what had happened to the region’s Arabs.