I can usually tell when someone else’s grievance has become an excuse. Mine comes with a date and time, and a persuasive account of what happened first.
That account may be true. What happened first matters but does not settle what follows. The wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and the widening conflict with Iran show this difficulty beyond personal quarrels. People invoke violence they suffered while committing acts that require judgment. Recognizing one wrong need not obscure another.
A grievance can expose a wrong and help put it right. But it can also become a claim to innocence, as though what happened first settles what one is entitled to do next.
Violence leaves people wanting their suffering acknowledged, and the wrong put right. But being seen only as a victim can make a person seem helpless. Acknowledging what happened should not stop us from asking whether what they do next is right.
Victimhood can harden into victimism. A wrong suffered becomes the whole account of a life, grievance a source of authority. Someone who does harm can tell a persuasive story about what they suffered. The story may be true but cannot justify what they do to someone else.
Victimism becomes harder to resist when people share a history of violence. Shared memory can sustain a demand for justice but also make retaliation feel like loyalty and criticism feel like another attack.
René Girard saw how enemies come to resemble one another. We learn what to desire from others, he argued, and rivalry draws us toward those we oppose. In a conflict defined by grievance, each side sees aggression in the other and necessity in itself. Enemies borrow each other’s tactics and then point to those tactics as proof they have nothing in common.
Girard wrote about the scapegoat: the person a community casts out to relieve its tensions. A community that has suffered violence has reason to seek accountability. But even a deserved judgment can carry the impossible hope that someone else’s ruin will make it whole. The wrong remains, as does the temptation to place it on another person.
The first act of violence does not disappear when its victims retaliate. Nor does it settle the judgment of their retaliation. No one gains clean hands from being wronged.
The pattern has a smaller, more familiar form in ordinary life. A colleague wrongs us; someone we love causes pain. The harms differ, but a similar difficulty arises when an account of what happened becomes impossible to question without causing offense. Anger can reveal a wrong but also make the remedy harder to see.
A grievance deserves to be heard. It must leave room to ask what was done, what followed, and what might now be put right. Suffering draws attention to a wrong but cannot, on its own, tell us where justice ends and retaliation begins.
Yet the cycle can be broken. When Hamas killed Maoz Inon’s parents on October 7, he and his family rejected revenge. He later joined Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian whose brother died from injuries sustained after beatings in an Israeli prison.
Abu Sarah wanted revenge for years. His loss and Inon’s came decades apart. Each took a different path toward refusing revenge. Now they travel together, telling their families’ stories and asking Israelis and Palestinians to hear one another.
Neither asks the other to set aside his grief. They show that acknowledging another’s loss need not diminish one’s own, and that what happened need not decide what they do next. Neither believes his people can secure a future by making the other suffer.
In a household, a workplace, or a country at war, the first wrong matters. We can ask what is owed to those who suffered, then consider whether the remedy we seek will repair the damage or spread it. Those judgments belong together. A remedy that spreads harm passes the next grievance to someone else, as when a child bears a parent’s grievance or civilians suffer for their government’s acts.
The past offers reasons to strike back. Inon and Abu Sarah offer no reason to forget it. Their work asks something harder: to remember what happened without treating the memory as permission to repeat the harm. That choice does not settle every question of justice. It keeps the future from being decided by the first wrong alone.
Neither man arrived there alone. Overcoming grievance takes practice, and others help us learn it. We need companions who know what was done and what we have endured, whether they agree with the judgment we draw from it. They can keep a grievance from becoming the only truth we know about ourselves—or a warrant for what we do to others.
Another future becomes imaginable.
Notes and reading
The Age of Grievance—Frank Bruni (2024). Bruni traces the appeal of grievance across American politics and culture. His book helps distinguish a demand for justice from the conviction that having been wronged makes one right about everything that follows.
Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood—Lilie Chouliaraki (2024). Chouliaraki asks who gets recognized as a victim, who gets cast as a perpetrator, and how claims of injury can become claims to power. A persuasive account of suffering deserves attention without settling the judgment of someone’s actions.
Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times—Irshad Manji (2019); see also her essay on diversity and cultural power. Manji asks advocates of inclusion to recognize the power they hold, including the power to exclude those who disagree with them. Her challenge is to practice the openness they ask of others, especially when they believe their own cause is just. See also her comment on my previous post, “When Power Cannot Hear.”
Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture—Eva Illouz (2003). Illouz examines how suffering is told in public through the culture surrounding Oprah Winfrey. Recognition can bring relief, but the story can also reduce a person to what was done to them, making pain the measure of a life.
The Scapegoat—René Girard, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Girard examines how a community in conflict can find unity by blaming someone it casts out. His account informs this essay’s warning about the hope that another person’s ruin will make a wounded community whole. It does not mean that every act of holding someone accountable is scapegoating.
The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land—Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon (2026). Abu Sarah and Inon tell their families’ histories and their work together across the Israeli–Palestinian divide. Neither denies loss as they imagine a future together.
Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.
