The past days have carried an unusual intensity. Since moving to Kuwait City, I have found myself returning, almost involuntarily, to the year I spent between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Distance has not dissolved those experiences; rather, it has reconfigured them, bringing into focus patterns that once felt too immediate to grasp.

It is from this position—geographically removed, yet intellectually and emotionally entangled—that I begin to trace a recurring question: how do we come to perceive certain people, actions, or spaces as “pure” or “impure,” legitimate or threatening? In turning toward this question, I will move through the conceptual lens offered by Mary Douglas, whose notion of purity as a matter of order and classification provides a way to think beyond surface-level moral judgments. What emerges is not only an inquiry into cultural systems of meaning, but also a reflection on how these systems shape perception, justify boundaries, and sustain divisions.

The gift of having friends and conversations with Israeli Jews and Palestinians challenges many ideas on life and reframes the concept of reality. One of my favorite and most influential memories from those talks is when my friend from Palestine articulated how he would never see the conflict stop, as he would be a Zionist himself if he had been born in Tel-Aviv and experienced the life, narrative, and bombs there. He articulated perfectly what cultural relativism is and its crucial importance in shaping our values. Just as my Jewish friend from Jerusalem, who self-reflectively tries to avoid negative opinions on Palestinians, has realized the tendency to generalize, the same generalization harmed him too. He felt the need to observe the other narrative with respect just as his own lived experience and never-fading love for the land. Both of those people believed the total opposite on many things. Besides two principles: that religion and the land have to be respected and that they choose their people over everything.

Their morals are the strong pillar thatto circulate around the difference between ethics and morality. The way we think about war. Some stay. Some fight. Some fled. Everybody has a reason to support their choice. Maybe regret later; maybe will be even more proud when remembering back. But it is never easy.

To endure what seems unbearable is only possible if we have a “why.” There must be a sufficiently strong reason for which we are willing to sacrifice our present state as an investment in the future. It is like when we can no longer keep running, and we stop, gasping for air. In the midst of near collapse, we look up and see the goal—and strength is regenerated within us. When we feel brutally lost, someone encourages us. When we are afraid, but someone beside us is even more afraid, for their sake we become brave and take control.

War is similar in this sense—on the level of the individual, who may be willing to sacrifice their own life to make a country free and liveable. Yet the political forces behind it are choreographed differently in the background. Freedom often means money; liveability can mean territory and oil in the political vocabulary. These are also motivating factors for those at the top of the power hierarchy, but the collateral damage does not affect them. I would argue that the leaders of a country at war would not continue under the kinds of hardships that an average person experiences during war.

Therefore, I do not consider their “why” to be sufficiently grounded. A “why” is strong when it is rooted in internal, need-based, stable motivation—human relationships, attachment, and autonomy. These are characterized by safety and calmness, by connection to others. In contrast, external motivational factors are rooted in relational, status-based, and recognition-driven social comparison. Achieving such goals is accompanied by greater anxiety and instability, and due to hedonic adaptation, they do not provide lasting fulfillment.

There is another way to compare these internal and external motivational factors: their moral and ethical dimensions.

Our moral order is tied to a kind of internal compass, while ethics is its conscious, systematic examination. Good intentions are not the same as correct principles, and consistency does not necessarily produce compassionate outcomes. It is possible to be ethically consistent yet morally questionable—for example, the elimination of a legitimate military target in order to prevent a greater evil. However, civilians suffer in the process, which strongly conflicts with empathy. In such cases, one may understand the logic yet still find it unacceptable.

This discussion sets aside cases in which the designation of “military targets” in civilian areas is manipulated or used as a pretext for deliberately inflicting harm on civilians. The dilemma, as outlined here, operates in principle—on paper—under the assumption of good-faith judgment rather than strategic mislabeling. Even within this constrained frame, it becomes evident that the issue does not unfold solely along a simple ethical–moral axis but rather within a set of finely graded and shifting scales. Its complexity remains profound, shaped by context as well as by our own positionality and background.

A similar question arises with ceasefires, which may bring temporary peace but could cost even more lives in the long term, as they allow for rearmament. Love for one’s family or nation may be morally justified, yet defending it at all costs can contribute to the violation of serious ethical principles.

Mary Douglas’s theory of “purity” forms a bridge between moral intuitions and formal ethical systems. According to her well-known definition, dirt is simply “matter out of place.” This is not a hygienic statement but a symbolic one, concerned with social order. She argues that our moral sensibilities arise from culturally learned categories and the distinction between order and chaos.

Based on these theories, we can see that phenomena we categorize as harmful often merely violate our own categories, and that is why we perceive them as dangerous. These context- and culture-dependent phenomena are therefore not simply the result of intuitive or rational definitions but reflections of our socialization and cultural development.

Ethical-moral dilemmas emerge when weighing the collateral losses and gains of ceasefires, hostage exchanges, or the delivery of aid while simultaneously distinguishing between “us” and “them.” We tend to view our own side as pure and worthy of protection while categorizing the other as contaminated. This distorts what we consider acceptable and whom we recognize as a true victim. At a deeper level, this dilemma is a choice between values: empathy and immediate suffering on the one hand, and long-term outcomes and consequences on the other.

Importantly, these systems extend beyond material objects to encompass social and moral categories. Societies construct boundaries that distinguish between what belongs and what does not, between the acceptable and the threatening. These distinctions are not neutral; they are imbued with normative significance and serve to stabilize collective identities.

Within this theoretical framework, the differentiation between lives in my friend’s statement can be understood as part of a broader symbolic ordering. The classification of one group as more central or valuable reflects a system in which moral concern is distributed unevenly. The death of an individual is not evaluated solely on universal ethical grounds but through its position within a hierarchy of belonging.

What is particularly noteworthy is that this hierarchy is not articulated as overt hostility. Rather, it is framed in terms of necessity and survival. This aligns with Douglas’s insight that systems of purity and order are often experienced as natural and self-evident by those who inhabit them. The boundaries they produce are rarely questioned, as they are foundational to the coherence of the social world.

However, the implications of such systems are profound. When moral valuation is structured through rigid classifications, empathy becomes selective. The suffering of those categorized as “outside” the primary group is more easily assimilated, minimized, or rendered acceptable. In this sense, symbolic boundary-making can facilitate forms of moral exclusion without requiring explicit dehumanization.

Douglas’s analysis thus provides a critical lens for understanding how deeply embedded classificatory systems shape ethical perception. The effort to maintain symbolic “cleanness”—whether moral, ethnic, or political—entails the continual ordering of the world into categories of greater and lesser value. While such ordering is fundamental to social organization, it also carries the risk of legitimizing unequal distributions of concern and, in extreme cases, of justifying violence.

That's why I would argue that love can stop war—love towards whom? It can be selective. But conversations give hope and help to bring closer those worlds living next to each other.

After many long conversations, it became impossible to ignore the recurring pattern: a certain respect toward the “other” on both sides, intertwined with a parallel justification of violence rooted in loyalty, fear, and the moral prioritization of one’s own group. As someone who has not lived the reality of those born into these conditions, the most I can do is to ask—and to listen. To seek understanding, even where agreement is not possible. To unsettle inherited categories and question the stability of ideologies that so easily divide.

This demands a continuous inner labor: a willingness to remain within discomfort, to confront the inconsistencies within my own thinking, and to resist the ease of fixed positions.

What else remains, if not the attempt to recognize and transform the double standards we carry within ourselves?

As a European, I must also confront the illusion that distance grants clarity—that being removed from the immediate reality of conflict somehow allows for a more objective or informed perspective. In truth, it often produces the opposite: a simplified understanding shaped by mediated narratives, historical blind spots, and the comfort of abstraction. What appears as knowledge may in fact be a form of detachment, where complexity is reduced to categories that feel coherent but fail to grasp lived reality.

To recognize this is to step away from the position of presumed understanding and instead inhabit a more uncertain, but perhaps more honest, stance. Not one of knowing better, but of knowing less—and therefore needing to listen more carefully. It is an acknowledgment that perspective is always situated and that distance does not neutralize bias but can just as easily conceal it.

References

Mary Douglas. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.