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We’re all Palestinians now

Brian Cobb
VIOLENCE is the world's leading public health problem. It causes more untimely death and disability than anything else. As I write this, more than 1,000 Palestinians have died and nearly 5,000 injured. Tens of thousands have been psychologically injured or left homeless. Watching one horrid image after another leaves us feeling angry, sad, and powerless.
Overt violence is merely the tip of the iceberg, the most obvious, but not the most common or damaging form. The social and economic violence of lack of opportunity, extreme poverty, discrimination, humiliation, and denial of the essentials of life is the leading cause of many diseases. The Palestinian people have suffered more from this type of violence than from the more newsworthy military incursion and subsequent atrocities, and the terrorism that allegedly provoked the war arose from profound and longstanding structural violence.
Modern epidemiological concepts can help us understand the endemic and epidemic violence destroying the world. "Ro" is the term for the reproduction rate of the disorder, i.e. the number of people subsequently infected by one infected person. IftheRois>l,each case will infect enough others to create a cascade of increasing incidence: an epidemic.
The higher the Ro, the faster the spread and the greater the number affected. IfRo =
1, you have a stable prevalence whereby the number affected remains constant. But if Ro is < 1, there will be fewer and fewer cases over time and die disease will disap-
pear.
Violence is rooted in attitudes. We're not machines or pigeons in which a given stimulus always elicits a given response; between stimulus and response lies choice, die essence of free-will and die basis of accountability. Accordingly, our attitudes determine how we will respond. Attitudes are memes, socially constructed and transmitted entities.
We get these memes from people, our culture, our religion, the things we watch, listen to or read, and the thoughts we think Our free will allows us to question and accept or reject the memes to which we are exposed. The thoughtful person isn't a passive receptacle for memes, and many memes conflict.
Overt social and economic violence happen because enough people have accepted the memes that support it. One is that violence is an acceptable, or even desirable solution to problems. One is that the victims of violence somehow deserve it; the poor deserve the suffering because they are lazy or wicked; war victims deserve it because they are members of a society that has done something wrong; battered women or children deserve it because they have misbehaved. Another violence-enabling meme holds that it is inevitable, and to be accepted and not questioned.
Memes are dynamic The meme of slavery was once universally accepted. But during the late Enlightenment of the early 19th century, people began to question the meme. The emotion that led to its destruction is empathy, coupled with a sense that we ought to treat others as we'd like to be treated. The concept of women and children as chattels, or tire property of their fathers or husbands, has lost ground due to empathy.
I'm an American, a professor, a chemist, and micro-biologist with a medical degree in die specialties of internal medicine and critical care. I work in Bangladesh caring for the poorest and most vulnerable, mostly children, in the intensive care unit and HIV/Aids ward of which I'm in charge.
I've spent years in trauma centres and cared for people in war zones. I've seen the many faces of violence and know how ugly they all are. The world is full of suffering and injustice, and I alone can't change it or alleviate more than an infinitesimal fraction of it.
By teaching others I can extend my reach exponentially, but the cumulative effect is still a drop of relief in an ocean of suffering. So why bother? Because, as Rabbi Hillel said: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am 1? If not me, who? If not now, when?" Or, as Margaret Mead said: "Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
But not everyone is vouchsafed the opportunity of doing humanitarian work, so what can the rest do? Quite a bit, it turns out. When you hear someone express intolerance towards an ethnic, religious, socio-economic, national or sexual group, don't just sit in silence and implicitly condoneit
While denunciation and personal attacks make things worse rather than better, a gentle "You know, I used to feel that way too, but I can't agree with you. Not all of them are the same, and every group
has some good and some bad members. If you were in their situation, you might very well feel differently than you now do. Give them a chance and you'll change your mind," or something similar, sometimes changes minds.
The meme seeds you plant won't always germinate, and they may take a long time to grow, but over time things change, and even a small change of Ro can tip an epidemic into extinction. You can also immunise people against hateful memes by modeling tolerance and compassion.
By challenging prejudice you inculcate empathy that expands to cover more and more people, eventually all of humanity. Intolerance is a meme, but one in competition with the meme of tolerance.
When I see the suffering, the atrocities,
the destruction heaped upon the people in Palestine by those from Israel, I see the humanity of the victims and the inhumanity of their assailants.
1 marvel that Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that humans were created in the image of God, but can't see that image in the face of a child or a woman or an elderly person -- or, more challengingly, in the face of the perpetrator who claims to be doing God's work in butchering His children.
When I see doctors refusing to care for HIV patients, I'm distressed that their moral vision is blinded to God's image in the suffering and their hands are paralysed by irrational fear and ignorance. When I see affluent citizens cheat a hungry rickshaw puller of a few taka as they
hurry off to the mosque pray to the God in whose image that wretched labourer was created. I consider that a tiny act of generosity wouldn't substantially affect the passenger but may make the difference between food and starvation for the worker's family. All are evidence of empathic failure.
So the next time you hear bigoted comments, or see injustice, do something small. Light a candle in the knowledge that light overcomes darkness, and mil lions of candles coalesce to drive back the night of despair. Remember Edmund Burke's warning: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough good men to do nothing."
Professor Brian Cobb. M.D., is Consultant-in-Charge of the ICU and the HIV/AJDS ward of ICDDRB in Dhaka
***So the next time you hear bigoted comments, or see injustice, do something small. Light a candle in the knowledge that light overcomes darkness, and millions of candles coalesce to drive back the night of despair. Remember Edmund Burke's warning: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough good men to do nothing."***