My current reading includes large sections of dense academic arguments about language, nationality, race and tribal identity in the Caucasus, all with a view to determining whether thousands of people are in fact Jewish and therefore “OK”
to murder in cold blood.

I’ve gone on in this blog on many occasions about our willingness to label and by labelling to create a sense of other. Most of the time it appears relatively benign and innocent, possibly even necessary, but it takes very little for it to tip into pernicious, brutal, absolute definitions that bring out the worst in us.

Going back to my previous post about the state, when these perceived differences become manifest at scale, it becomes all too easy to pick sides, to draw lines. Arguably, the ordinary people on either side of the lines that have been drawn in the Middle East have more in common than they have taught to believe .

But we cling to these stories of group identity and fight for them, often to the death.