Empathy, Sympathy, Disability, and Death
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
The role and fate of the physician or healer in times of war have been continually unclear. Left to the discretion of authoritarian regimes that role has always become an agent of the regime. The Geneva Convention circa 1914 sought to preserve the healing amicable interpretation. Dictatorships and terroristic regimes have no qualms about exploiting the role. In the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, it seems clear and U.S. intelligence believes that Hamas has been hiding soldiers, weapons, and communications equipment in dugouts under hospitals. The IDF now plans to flood those areas with warm water from the Red Sea, drowning the Hamas fighters and any number of medical personnel and their patients.
I remember many years ago, trapping a rat in a borrowed live creature trap, calling county animal control who promptly sent out a truck, and a female officer who promptly let the rat escape back into my home environment. She left but the rat came back to be trapped again. This time I elected to drown the creature in a barrel of water. Having done so, I nonetheless felt some disquietude on seeing the fight for life that the creature had put up. I wonder about the disquietude on the part of the IDF, the Israeli government, and the average Israeli citizen, knowing that human beings are drowning like rats. Some of them are doctors and their patients. I expect less humanity from Hamas, who not only made the drowning scenario possible but engaged and is engaging in torture and rape. What makes us human? Kipling’s "Though I've belted you and flayed you, by the living god that made you, you’re a better man than I am Gunga Din" comes to mind.
Is the two-state solution possible? Some suggest that there is evidence that Netanyahu supplied money to Hamas and Hezbollah (some of it from American-Israeli relief funds), to keep pro-two state advocates out of the governing of Gaza and Palestinians. The cynicism and corruption that characterizes such acts require a nonhuman "Definition of the situation." Bestiality may be an appropriate advisor.
