Sympathy, the Enemy of Compassion

David Lamarre-Vincent

July 31, 2008

Ramallah, Palestine – an Occupied Territory of the West Bank

Today once again we listen. Omar Barhouti and Dr. Gabi Baramki speak of their hopes for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural. Sam Bahour, a Palestinian businessman (by way of Youngstown OH) speaks of his hopes for Palestinian business.  Representatives of Al Haq speak of their documentation, monitoring, and advocacy for cases of human rights violations by either Palestinians or Israelis and finally Tala Abu Rahme and Sanabel Hassan speak from their lives as twenty something women growing up Palestinian in the West Bank or Jerusalem.

Today was a day to listen to the dire straits lived daily by Palestinians. It was a day to listen to their hopes for support for economic boycott, divestment and sanctions against what they experience as an apartheid regime. Their lives are dictated by daily Israeli government intrusions that seem to be arbitrary and simply based upon a division of people in this land based upon their humanity.

Their call was for the preparation of civil society in Palestine and Israel as well as the U.S. for reception of their stories of oppression. 

The greatest challenge laid down was that they choose the language and strategy of oppression and path to freedom.  The enemy of advancement is the reception of sympathy from people outside of their lives. The sympathetic wish to aid in resolution of this intractable situation but often impose (in the case of U.S. citizens) our own sense of the correct language and strategy and perception of path to peace.

This sympathy is a barrier to compassion, a barrier to simply allowing ourselves to experience their reality for a moment. Sympathy maintains the distance of the privileged who can come, see, and leave freely. Compassion, being moved in one’s heart, requires a loss of the distance between ourselves and Palestinians so that we may simply stand silently next to them as their words and actions move us to a deeper sense of their lives.

Tolerance and sympathy maintain a distance between people with one being privileged over the other. Compassion is the much harder spiritual move to relinquish our positions of power and privilege and take the downward path of powerlessness to be open to the fuller experience of the lives of others in all their joy and sorrow without qualification or interpretation.

Compassion is proving to be a painful experience but one that also has glimpses of hope. Christians can think of the need to go through the suffering and death of Jesus before the glorious experience of the resurrection. We have experience the suffering and death. It is in compassion with those least privileged that we experience glimmers of resurrection in our own lives that are not accessible in all of protected, comfortable and powerful daily lives at home.