Pain and terror

The impact of terror-violence upon Israeli civilians is often underestimated. This is due to the general incommunicability of physical pain. No human language can ever really describe such pain, and the unique monstrousness of terrorism is generally reduced to an abstract inventory of "casualties."

Everyone has suffered physical pain, and everyone knows that bodily anguish not only defies language, but also destroys language. Inexpressibility of pain can have major political and social outcomes. In the case of intermittent but relentless terror against Israelis, it now stands in the way of recognizing such terror as barbarism. Shielded by the inherent limitations of language, suicide-bombers are able to present themselves as "armed combatants." In fact, these murderers are anything but soldiers or "freedom fighters."

There is, from the terrorist point of view, no reasonable hope of transforming Israeli pain into Arab or Islamic power. On the contrary, the Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Fatah/Hezbollah resort to carnage and mayhem will likely stiffen even the most "liberation" minded hearts. So why do these terrorists continue to inflict great pain upon innocents without foreseeable pragmatic benefit? Have these terrorists now abandoned the usual political playbook of policy advantage? Have they simply traded in Clausewitz for De Sade?

A partial answer is that terrorists are imprisoned by the remorseless shortfalls of human language. The pain experienced by one human body can never genuinely be shared with another, even if these bodies are closely related by blood and even if the dividing distance is short. The split between one's own body and the body of another is always absolute. This split allows even the most heinous harm to "others" to be viewed "objectively." In world politics, this harm can sometimes even be accepted as a form of "national liberation."

For terrorists and their supporters, the violent death meted out to Israelis is always only an abstraction. As "infidels," we hear again and again, their victims lack "sacredness." Murdering these Jewish victims is not secondary to any larger purpose. It is their purpose.

Physical pain within the human body not only destroys ordinary language, but can actually bring about a visceral reversion to pre-language human sounds — that is, to those primal moans and cries and whispers that are anterior to learned speech. While the many victims of terror writhe agonizingly from the burns and the nails and the screws dipped ever so lovingly into rat poison, neither the world's public, who bear silent witness, nor the screaming murderers themselves can even begin to experience what is being suffered. This incapacity is surely not an excuse for the bystanders or for the perpetrators, but it does help to explain why even callous killing and mutilation by terrorists can sometimes be construed as rebellion. Moreover, the incommunicability of physical pain further amplifies Israeli injuries from terrorism by reminding the victims that their suffering is not only intense but also understated. For the victims, there is never an anesthesia strong enough for the pain, but for the observers and for the perpetrators, the victims' pain is always anesthetized.

For all who shall still hear about the latest Palestinian or Hezbollah attack upon a nursery school, a kindergarten van, a city bus, an ice-cream parlor, a pizza shop or a falafel stand, the suffering intentionally ignited upon Jewish civilians will never be truly felt. And even then, this suffering will flicker for only a moment before it disappears. Though it will be years before the "merely wounded" are ever again able to move their own violated bodies beyond immeasurable boundaries of torment, newspaper readers and television viewers will pause only for a second before progressing to less disturbing forms of discourse.

By its very nature, physical pain has no decipherable voice. When, at last, it finds some dimming sound at all, the listener no longer wants to be bothered. This human listener, mortal and fragile, wishes, pathetically but understandably, to deny his or her own flesh and blood vulnerabilities.

All things move in the midst of death, and the denial of death is humankind's basic preoccupation. As a result, the pain of others is necessarily kept at a safe distance, and the horror of that pain is purposefully blunted by language. This problem of justice can never really be "solved," but the sources of any possible improvement lie nonetheless in suffering, blood and the commonly-felt agony of personal extinction.

From the standpoint of Israel's struggle for survival in a genocidal region, the country's leaders must soon come to admit that the time for pretend "peace processes" is over, that their "road map" is merely an invented cartography for Jewish annihilation, that Israeli pain is much more important than diplomatic logic and that freely-flowing human tears have far deeper meanings than learned smiles. Louis Rene Beres GS '71 was a politics major and Ph.D. student, and now lectures and publishes widely on Israeli security matters and international law. He is Chair of "Project Daniel" and can be reached at beres@polsci.purdue.edu.