Israel has a plan to exile the entire Palestinian population of Gaza.
Israeli far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has reportedly laid out a plan that aims to see 250,000 Palestinians leave Gaza in the first year, followed by the rest of its roughly two million residents over the following six years.
Now, at one level, I find Israel's handling of the Palestinians — which includes such things as pogroms, genocide and mass exile — to be odd.
But at another level, I find it quite normal too.
It is odd because, for centuries, if not millennia, Jews themselves have endured pogroms, genocide and mass exile.
You would think that if you have endured a great deal of suffering in your life, and you know firsthand just how wretched that experience is, you would not wish it upon someone else.
But that is not exactly how life works, is it?
When we endure a great deal of pain, rather than renouncing it, we sometimes embrace it.
The pain we have endured can make us feel that we have earned a licence to inflict that same pain upon others.
In our own country, for example, after enduring decades of injustice and exploitation under colonial rule, we now impose the same forms of injustice and exploitation that we had once endured from our colonial masters upon our foreign workers .
Many abused children grow up to become abusive parents.
As juniors, if you endure ragging in college or university, you may eventually feel perfectly entitled to rag your own juniors once you become a senior.
And perhaps this is one of the darkest things about human nature.
We don't necessarily learn compassion from suffering.
Often, what happens after we suffer, is that we just normalise the suffering we have endured.
We might even celebrate it, for all you know, once we are in position to inflict suffering instead of enduring it.
You would think that every victim would so despise their abusers, but actually, it might be the case that victims admire their abusers, even if they despise the abuse that they receive from their abusers.
When you admire your abusers but despise the abuse that you received from your abusers, you will just despise yourself for being a victim - and seek to to imitate your abusers, so that you can be more like them and less like yourself.
I thought about this tonight because it occurred to me that whenever we endure injustice or suffering, it is very easy to convince ourselves that we did not deserve it — especially when we remember all the good things we have done.
But perhaps there is another way of looking at it.
Perhaps we should broaden our minds enough to recognise that we are not merely the victims of injustice. We are also capable of becoming the people who inflict upon others the very things we once hated having inflicted upon us, when we begin to understand that maybe life is fair after all.
In the end. we always get what we deserve.
If we don't think we deserve what we got, it is likely the case that we have forgotten who we are, not that we don't deserve what we got.
So when something terrible happens to us, rather thanask:
“Why me? What did I ever do to deserve this?”
Perhaps it would be better to open our mind, and see more clearly all the things we have intended and done in our past.
We should, because what we believe is injustice might simply be Fate reminding us about the part of our own story that we have chosen to forget.
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