Engineering Suffering

How prolonged pain in Gaza is used to shrink a people’s dreams from liberation to mere survival.

In one of the bleakest and most somber exchanges between O’Brien and Winston in George Orwell’s 1984, inside the torture room:

— O’Brien: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?

— Winston: By making him suffer.

As simple and symbolic as Winston’s answer may seem, it captures with striking depth the essence of an occupation policy that has sought to inflict the greatest possible degree of suffering on the people of Gaza, until they are crushed and exhausted, chasing only the burdens of daily survival while forgetting their larger national aspirations. The dream of an entire people—freedom, return, independence—shrinks into a daily search for bread and water. The opening of a crossing becomes the height of hope, even when wrapped in humiliation and degradation. It is as if there is a deliberate remolding and engineering of collective consciousness: lowering ambitions by breaking the will through prolonged suffering that goes beyond killing, displacement, destruction, and even military defeat, into an inner defeat lodged within each person’s soul.

In Orwell’s logic, ultimate control is not exercised by repression alone, but by reducing dreams and aspirations to their lowest possible level. Thus the tragedy deepens: people remain drained, their hopes dim, their goals shattered. When a nation is left bleeding for so long that its ambitions contract—from a whole homeland with freedom and independence to the mere securing of food and a tent, from return to safe exit, from Jerusalem to a checkpoint—this is not simply a humanitarian crisis. It is a forced redefinition of what we are allowed to dream of as our maximum horizon. The defeat lies not only in creating an unlivable environment, but in turning that misery into a sustainable reality, shifting the struggle away from political rights to the bare minimum of human survival.

At the height of this daily anguish, collective awareness is reshaped. Memory is trained to forget, and dreams are compelled to shrink. Basic rights—food, medicine, shelter, education, travel, return—become distant wishes suspended along a road paved with waiting, oppression, and pain.

The victims whose dreams have evaporated cannot be blamed for clinging instead to the most fundamental needs at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy. Yet this condition must not be accepted as destiny. Without delay, a new awareness and a renewed hope must be built, armed with a resilience inherited across generations and a determination to hold on to any glimmer that can restore confidence in our ability to change reality. We must prepare for a long struggle to lift people from despair and fracture toward recovery, action, and reconstruction, with the support of all who believe in our right to live with dignity on our land.

This demands the highest degree of selflessness, unity, and solidarity, closing every loophole before an occupying power that seeks, by all means, to resume killing and annihilation.