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This week I was struck by reports about the US government agreeing to provide anti-personnel landmines to Ukraine. Those destructive weapons signal a new stage in the conflict as the outgoing President tries to bolster Ukraine’s war effort. At the same time horrendous wars in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian territories are killing tens of thousands there but also wreaking damage to relationships here.

We’re fortunate to be at peace as a country, but not necessarily as people, because of the effects of these overseas wars. Witnessing wars is qualitatively different than it’s ever been because of unmediated images of extreme suffering on our televisions and phones and because so many of us are attached to other parts of the world. It’s better to know the truth but also to be aware that we ourselves might be changed, damaged and even brutalised by this experience. What happens in the Middle East, doesn’t stay in the Middle East.

Often, empathy seems to be reserved for some people and not others. Israel or Palestine, Jews or Muslims, there’s a caustic fantasy that people are all evil or all good.

Thirty-six times, the Torah commands the Jewish people to have empathy – to treat others properly, because we were that other, strangers and slaves in ancient Egypt. And God is definitive – ‘If you do mistreat them, I will listen to their outcry as soon as they cry out to Me… if they cry out to Me, I will listen, for I am compassionate."

Landmines are horrendous weapons of war - landmines of past conflicts lurk hidden under the surface, harbouring destruction for generations. We may be turning the landmines of overseas wars into anti-personal, anti-social, destructive land mines here, that will threaten to detonate for decades to come unless we map them right now and disarm them.

There is one sure method to disarm these compassion and empathy-suppressing mines. It’s curiosity. I believe that is the ultimate disarming tool. The power of questions, of doubt. The defusing effect of one modest question, ‘I wonder why.’ “I wonder why they do that, think that, respond that way.’ ‘Do you really think that?’

Suppressing of empathy is our own weapon of psychological warfare, our own internalised landmine. It might enable soldiers to fight on the battlefield but far away, when we suppress empathy – when we don’t ask about others, we can damage ourselves, our sense of self and capacity to be with our pain, anger and sadness.

Let’s not let the impact of the wars aboard lay a minefield for our future relations here

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