There is perhaps no tragedy more recurrent in human history than the spectacle of the persecuted inheriting power and immediately adopting the moral vocabulary, habits, and instruments of persecution themselves. It is one of civilization’s bleakest patterns: the jailer changes uniforms, the slogans are rewritten, the flags altered, the hymns modernized—but the prison remains intact.
This was a theme that Christopher Hitchens returned to repeatedly, because he understood something deeply unfashionable in modern political discourse: suffering does not confer virtue. Oppression is not a sacrament. Victimhood is not an inoculation against barbarism. Human beings do not emerge purified from catastrophe; they emerge wounded, fearful, tribalized, and often quite capable of reproducing the very cruelties they once denounced.
And so we arrive at Zionism, not merely as the historical aspiration for a Jewish homeland after centuries of exile, pogrom, and ultimately industrialized genocide, but as a modern nationalist project that increasingly resembles the very species of ethno-national absolutism that Jews themselves once had every reason to fear. One must state this carefully because the contemporary world has become hysterically incapable of moral nuance. To criticize the actions of the Israeli state is not to deny Jewish suffering any more than criticizing Saudi Arabia constitutes hatred of Muslims or condemning Vladimir Putin amounts to hatred of Russians. The refusal to distinguish between a people and a government is itself one of the first symptoms of authoritarian thinking.
The tragedy of Zionism, at least in its current hardening form, is that it risks transforming a legitimate historical refuge into a theology of permanent siege. A state born from the ashes of European fascism now increasingly justifies illiberalism through the language of existential fear. Historical trauma, which should have produced humility, instead becomes weaponized as moral exemption. The argument is no longer merely “we have the right to exist,” which no reasonable person disputes, but increasingly “our suffering authorizes whatever we deem necessary.” That is an altogether more dangerous proposition.
“Suffering is not a moral credential. It is a human condition.”
– Civil Heresy
Because history offers no shortage of warnings about what happens when nations begin treating their own pain as a license rather than a lesson.
The land itself, ancient, blood-soaked, sacred to half the human species does not belong exclusively to any single tribe, scripture, ethnicity, or flag. The soil remembers too many civilizations for that. Jews, Muslims, Christians, secular Palestinians, refugees, immigrants, mystics, atheists, conquerors, and survivors have all left fingerprints upon it. To insist that one population possesses an exclusive metaphysical claim over all others is not history; it is theology armed with a border policy.
And violence, however much we may condemn it, never emerges in a vacuum. This is another uncomfortable truth that modern political rhetoric prefers to suppress. People do not radicalize spontaneously like thunderstorms appearing from clear skies. Humiliation breeds extremism. Occupation breeds fanaticism. Despair breeds militancy. One can denounce Hamas—and one should, without hesitation, for its reactionary theocratic brutality and murderous nihilism—while still understanding that movements of this kind do not materialize from abstract evil. They emerge from conditions. They feed upon hopelessness.
Indeed, history repeatedly demonstrates that when populations are cornered long enough, they eventually choose rage over submission. The American Revolution did not arise because colonists were temperamentally peaceful men suddenly afflicted by madness. The French did not storm the Bastille because they had developed an unfortunate taste for guillotines. Cuba did not turn revolutionary because peasants enjoyed jungle warfare. Violence is often the final language spoken by people who believe every other language has failed them.
This explains Hamas. It does not excuse Hamas.
There is a difference, a distinction desperately needed in an age where explanation is routinely denounced as endorsement. The Palestinian population, fragmented, occupied, humiliated, and politically abandoned for generations, turned toward the most uncompromising force available because despair often seeks certainty in extremity. Nationalism mixed with religious absolutism is combustible in any culture. It was combustible in Christian Europe. It is combustible in Islamist movements. It is combustible in Jewish extremism as well.
And herein lies the larger warning for the world.
The Middle East is not merely a regional conflict; it is a mirror held up to modern civilization itself. It demonstrates how easily historical suffering can become historical entitlement. How quickly fear becomes ideology. How readily nationalism mutates into sanctimony. And how populations conditioned to see themselves exclusively as victims can become incapable of recognizing the suffering of others.
The lesson should be obvious by now: no people are morally exempt from history. No nation remains virtuous indefinitely simply because it once endured atrocity. The oppressed do not become angels upon acquiring power. They become human beings—and human beings, absent restraint, law, humility, and self-criticism, are entirely capable of constructing new injustices atop the ruins of old ones.
The question is whether anyone still possesses the courage to say so aloud.
Why It Matters
This piece cuts through one of the most dangerous modern assumptions:
that suffering creates moral authority
It doesn’t.
History shows the opposite:
- Trauma hardens identity
- Identity demands protection
- Protection becomes justification
And once suffering becomes a license, restraint disappears. This isn’t about one country.
It’s about what happens every time power changes hands without self-criticism.
Key Takeaways
- Victimhood does not guarantee moral behavior
- Power reveals character, it does not purify it
- Nationalism + historical trauma = ideological volatility
- Extremism grows from conditions, not abstract evil
- Explanation is not endorsement but refusing explanation guarantees repetition
- No group is exempt from becoming what it once opposed
key questions to ask
Q1. Does suffering make groups morally better?
No. Historical evidence shows that suffering often produces fear, tribalism, and defensive aggression.
Q2. Why do oppressed groups sometimes replicate oppression?
Because power shifts without structural or moral constraints can reproduce existing patterns of control.
Q3. Is explaining extremism the same as justifying it?
No. Explanation identifies causes, while justification defends actions.
Q4. What is the risk of tying morality to victimhood?
It can create a sense of moral exemption, allowing harmful actions to be justified.
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