So Ireland, Spain and Norway have officially recognized Palestine as a state, South Africa has lodged a case alleging genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants against the Israeli prime minister, defense minister, and three senior Hamas leaders over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Outraged protests have broken out in major university campuses across the world -- particularly the Western world -- against Israeli atrocities in much of Palestine, protests starting in the East and West Coasts of the US and spreading to places as far as Paris and Melbourne.
What does all this tell you?
This sort of open-ended question will invariably inspire wordy responses, which would inevitably bring our individual biases and prejudices into play. But on sober reflection, one thing should strike most of us as interesting: people are responding to the suffering of others very different from them, living in parts of the world which they in all likelihood have neither seen, nor are ever likely to.
This I think is something relatively new. People have always reacted when they have felt others sharing their own nationality, ethnicity, religious persuasion or other interests have been wronged, but this level of indignation and righteous anger, often risking reputational and bodily harm, in support of oppressed people they have very little in common with -- now that's something you don't see every day. And in spite of all the bad news we hear from all around us, I think this is a sign that the world is changing for the better. In some respects, at least.
Most of us know that the word “empathy” means the intuitive ability to understand what other people feel, see things from their perspective, and imagine oneself in their place, their circumstances. The time has come to make a subtle change in the meaning of that word. Empathizing with the plight of people who are just like you -- isn't that just an extension of your own narrow self-interest? Don't we rally to their cause because we think if we don't, we may ourselves be threatened?
The true empaths are those who find common cause with the ones they have little or nothing in common with. Whose souls ache for the plight of people with whom they share very little -- who feel compassion beyond the boundaries of political or nationalistic or religious beliefs, ethnicity, race or skin colour, gender or sexual orientation or economic or cultural background. Empathy should be the ability to see yourself in people different from you. To rejoice in their happiness. To ache when they feel pain. And to feel anger when they are subjected to cruelties.
And this is where the young people I see around me -- the Millennials, Gen Z-ers or what have you -- are so much better than the rest of us. They seem to have the inexplicable, and unerring, ability to see the common humanity in all of us. When they take up a cause, all that matters to them is that their fellow humans are being unjustly persecuted. They don't care where those other humans live, what they look like or what they believe. They are young enough to be wiser than their elders.
And from the firestorm of outrage provoked by the babarities taking place in Palestine, it seems the young people have plenty of support among their elders as well. All across the world.
There is a quote by the great African-American writer, civil rights activist and social critic James Baldwin that I really love. Here's what he said: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
Now do a little soul-searching for a moment. Do you believe that? Do you really?
Because your children certainly do.
Tanvir Haider Chaudhury has spent most of his career as a banker and is now running a food and beverage company.
