This essay is part of an ongoing series on “peace preparation” — the emotional, relational, and narrative work that political agreements cannot do. Drawing on decades of work with couples, families, and dialogue programs, I’m exploring how grief, identity, and daily cooperation shape whether negotiated ceasefires and treaties can become something more than pauses between wars.

We often talk about borders, missiles, hostages, ceasefires, and deterrence when we talk about peace. We talk much less about the emotional realities beneath them: the reservoirs of grief that have been filling for generations, and the ways grief can either be honored—or hardened into grievance.

A peace agreement can redraw borders, exchange prisoners, and quiet guns for a time. It cannot, by itself, transform the emotions of parents who have buried children. It cannot make loss gentler than it is. That work is separate: psychological, moral, cultural. And when it is not done, grief easily becomes something else. It becomes grievance: a way of living in which loss is no longer only something we carry, but something we become.

Grief and grievance are not the same

Grief tells the truth about loss. It sits in living rooms and hospital corridors, in WhatsApp groups and memorial days, in empty chairs at Shabbat tables. It wants comfort, meaning, justice, and safety. It may never disappear, but it can be witnessed, supported, and gradually integrated into life.

Grief says: “I hurt. I need witness, safety, meaning.”Grievance says: “Because I hurt, you must hurt more.”Congruence says: “I can honor my pain without surrendering my humanity.”

Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Americans after 9/11, Serbs and Bosniaks after the Balkan wars, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland — all have faced moments when grief could be honored or weaponized. No community is immune from turning pain into identity or identity into justification for harming others.

Ben Gvir and grievance politics

Recent statements by Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, offer an unusually clear example of grievance politics in action.

Following the deaths of four Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, Ben Gvir declared that “all of Lebanon must burn” and that “for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep,” as reported by multiple outlets. In subsequent remarks, he repeated the same logic, saying that not a single tear from an Israeli mother could be tolerated even if it meant tears from a thousand Lebanese mothers, and describing Lebanon as a place that should become Israel’s “playground.”

These were not slips of the tongue. They were repeated expressions of a worldview in which security is measured not only by protection, but by the scale of suffering imposed on others.

The temptation is not confined to Israel. When President Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” in Iran and later said he was “fine with it,” he used the same emotional move: shifting from the language of deterrence to the fantasy of erasing an entire society. In both cases, grief and fear are invoked not only to justify defending citizens, but to imagine destruction on a civilizational scale. That is grievance politics: it takes real loss and stretches it into a vision in which safety seems to require making others weep forever.

The problem is not that such rhetoric is insufficiently angry. It is that it confuses deterrence with escalation. Deterrence seeks to shape an adversary’s behavior by making costs clear and predictable. Grievance seeks emotional satisfaction through disproportionality. When a leader moves from saying “we will stop attacks” to saying “all of Lebanon must burn,” the objective is no........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)