Suffer The Children

Who will be left to speak......

For so long humanity has waged war upon itself with far too little regard for those who suffer most — the children.

It matters little which nationality, religion, or border we speak of. Again and again, it is the youngest who bear the deepest wounds. At this moment, the suffering of Palestinian children has become almost unbearable to witness. I am eighty years old, and conflict in this region has existed for as long as I can remember. Entire generations of children have grown up beneath the shadow of fear, displacement, violence, and grief.

Yes, I say it is a war upon children, because children are always among its greatest casualties.

What troubles me most is not only the violence itself, but the tragic repetition of human history. One would hope that people who themselves carried the memory of persecution, displacement, and unimaginable suffering would become among the world’s strongest voices for compassion and restraint.

And yet history shows us something deeply painful: suffering alone does not automatically create wisdom. Trauma that is not healed can harden into fear. Fear can harden into defensiveness. And defensiveness, when amplified through politics, ideology, nationalism, and generations of conflict, can slowly erode our ability to see one another’s humanity.

This is not unique to one people or one nation. Human beings across history have repeated upon others the very wounds once inflicted upon themselves.

That is the tragedy.

Somewhere beneath politics, religion, borders, and generations of bloodshed are children who did not create these conflicts yet inherit them fully.

Where is the humanity?
Where is the compassion that suffering itself should have taught us?

Perhaps the deepest measure of civilization is not power, nor military strength, nor historical grievance, but whether we are capable of protecting the innocent even when fear, anger, and history urge us otherwise.

For so long people have said that all human beings truly want is to live in peace — to raise their families safely and to experience the ordinary joys of life. War stands in direct opposition to that longing.

And yet, even within war, children somehow continue to seek beauty. I once owned a remarkable book filled with drawings created by children imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. Amid unimaginable suffering, many of the drawings reflected simple joys: the sunrise, a flower blooming where it seemed impossible, the memory of home, birds, trees, and light. Even in darkness, children continued reaching toward life.

That has always stayed with me.

It is perhaps one of the deepest tragedies of humanity that suffering does not always lead to compassion. Sometimes it does. Sometimes those who have suffered become deeply committed to protecting others from pain. But at other times, trauma that remains unhealed hardens into fear, defensiveness, distrust, and the desperate need for control.

No people are immune to this.

I sometimes wonder whether nations, like individuals, can carry unresolved trauma across generations. Whether collective fear and grief can become embedded so deeply within identity that they begin shaping how a people responds to threat, memory, and survival itself.

As a child, I remember adults sitting in our living room telling stories about the suffering of Palestinians. They spoke quietly, often with grief and disbelief. I remember hearing stories of men and boys pulled from their homes and beaten, their hands smashed with rifle butts until bones shattered and infection set in because proper medical care was unavailable. At the same time, I also remember the idealism surrounding the creation of Israel. My own parents initially supported Israel and believed in the possibility of building something hopeful after the horrors endured by the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

I remember families being forced from their homes to register with authorities, only to return and find the houses demolished and reduced to rubble.

And I remember one image that never left me: a young woman in a bright orange jacket standing in front of a bulldozer, attempting to stop the destruction of a home. The color of the jacket made her impossible to miss. Later came the image of her death beneath the machine.

For a time the world spoke of her, and then, as so often happens, the world moved on.

But children do not move on so easily.
Memory does not disappear so easily.
Trauma does not disappear so easily.

At that time, many Palestinians were not respected by large parts of the Arab world itself. Some viewed them as backward or incapable of fully developing the land they occupied. As a result, there were Arab voices, including some Christian Arabs, who initially supported the creation of Israel or at least did not strongly oppose it.

But even as a child, I found myself wondering about the human consequences of such decisions. Land is never simply land. It carries memory, identity, ancestry, belonging, and the emotional imprint of generations who have lived upon it.

No one seemed to ask what it would feel like to lose one’s home, one’s history, or one’s place in the world.

I sometimes think about how Americans might respond if Manhattan were suddenly returned to Native Americans on the basis of historical claim. Whether one agrees or disagrees politically, the comparison reveals how deeply complicated questions of history, displacement, belonging, and identity truly are.

Perhaps one of humanity’s greatest failures is that we so often discuss nations, borders, and ideologies while forgetting the ordinary people whose lives are forever altered beneath those decisions.

Over time, however, the reality grew more complicated and painful.

And still, beneath all political positions and historical arguments remain children — Israeli children, Palestinian children, children everywhere — absorbing the emotional and physical consequences of conflicts they did not create.

What happens to the nervous systems of children raised within perpetual fear, grief, militarization, displacement, and violence? What does humanity become when generation after generation inherits trauma as normality?

When I lived in Rwanda, an entire month each year was devoted to grieving and remembrance. Every April, normal television programming stopped, and instead the country bore witness to the names, faces, and histories of those murdered during the genocide. People made pilgrimages to burial sites to honor the dead. Stadiums filled with mourners gathered to listen to the President speak about the horrors that had taken place.

The nation chose not to forget. It chose, instead, to remember publicly, collectively, and repeatedly — not only to honor the dead, but perhaps to prevent silence from burying the truth of what had occurred.

The nation did not forget.

Courts were held in local villages — the Gacaca courts — where people stood before their communities and spoke openly of what had happened, of the suffering inflicted, of neighbors murdered, of betrayals too painful to imagine. Nothing was hidden. Nothing was allowed to disappear quietly into silence. Everything was brought into the open and witnessed collectively.

This process continued for years.

After the genocide there were almost no psychologists available to help people process trauma. Instead, women often gathered together weaving baskets — baskets whose colors represented the different groups within Rwanda. And as they wove, they spoke. They spoke of grief, terror, loss, survival, and memory. The weaving itself became a form of communal healing.

Did it make a difference?

I do not know of any long-term studies that were done, and to me that remains a profound missed opportunity. But I do know this: the country has now experienced more than two decades of relative peace and has worked steadily to build stability and economic growth from unimaginable devastation.

Personally, I believe this willingness to confront trauma openly rather than bury it was one of the wisest things Paul Kagame did for the people of Rwanda.

Too often societies attempt to heal by forgetting. But unspoken trauma rarely disappears. More often, it sinks beneath the surface where it continues shaping future generations in silence.

Perhaps one of the great failures of the modern world is that we have never truly drawn a line and said:
Enough.
Children deserve something better than this.

Because children are always watching.
They see what adults normalize.
They absorb what adults justify.
And eventually they inherit the world we have created.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

— Martin Niemöller