On Human Suffering and Dialogue: Lessons from the 11 Sep 2025 UNSC Mtg. Regarding Israel’s Airstrikes on Doha

EDITORIAL, 15 Sep 2025

#916 | Tatsushi Arai - TRANSCEND Media Service

My first visit to Sderot, a town in southern Israel near the Gaza border, was in 2008. There, as a member of an international civil society group, I met two young Jewish girls who had learned to instinctively hide under a kitchen table whenever sirens warned of Qassam rockets fired from Gaza. The girls’ innocent yet fearful eyes have never left my mind.

During a subsequent visit in 2009, I met a Palestinian youth who had obtained a permit to leave his hometown to attend an Israeli-Palestinian civil society workshop. Acknowledging his limited English, he sang an Arabic song to express his sorrow under constant insecurity and fear. His heart-wrenching, high-pitched voice—forced from the depths of his lungs as his seated body bent forward—pierced my heart with untold stories that transcended language.

These and many other encounters with Israelis and Palestinians—including individuals regarded as extremists by their opponents—shaped my perspective on the televised United Nations Security Council (UNSC) meeting on September 11, 2025. The session was convened in response to Israel’s September 9 airstrikes on Doha, the Qatari capital, which was hosting a Hamas delegation for indirect negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage release.

While the significance of this UNSC meeting spans political, legal, diplomatic, geostrategic, economic, and other dimensions, I will focus on two often underrated aspects: the universality of human suffering and the role of dialogue in addressing it.

By suffering, I mean physical and psychological pain, often caused by deliberate human actions such as violence. Although pain is always context-specific and subjectively experienced, its agonizing impact is universal. The suffering of Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, atheists, or people of any nationality or identity is equally painful and debilitating.

Dialogue, by contrast, is an interactive exchange in which two or more parties express their deeply held beliefs and authentic feelings while listening attentively and learning from others. Debate, on the other hand, is an exchange in which each party presents pre-determined positions to persuade the other and prevail in a zero-sum contest.

Debate has its place. It can be a powerful tool of principled advocacy, especially where power imbalances silence the oppressed. But debate alone rarely sustains the kind of effort needed to ease human suffering in conflict. Dialogue—while it may include truth-seeking debates—can, when led effectively, open pathways to addressing the legitimate needs of opposing sides and to easing their suffering together in ways that debate alone never can. Seen in this light, the UNSC meeting on September 11 was a debate, not a dialogue. It left little room for mutual learning, and none for the deep self-reflection and problem-solving the world so urgently needs.

Some remarks sought to humanize victims by highlighting personal stories, potentially opening doors to dialogue and empathetic exchange that ultimately did not materialize. For instance, Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani described the tragic death of 22-year-old Qatari security officer Corporal Badr Saad Mohammed al-Humaidi al-Dosari, who was “martyred on duty,” as well as the injuries suffered by several civilians and members of Qatar’s Internal Security Force at the site struck by munitions fired from Israeli fighter jets. He stressed that the affected district was a civilian area, home to schools and residential buildings. These sentiments were echoed by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani during the public funeral for the deceased.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, took the floor to recount Israeli victims killed or wounded by two Palestinian gunmen on September 8, 2025, at a bus stop near Ramot Junction in Jerusalem. The following day, Hamas claimed responsibility for the attacks. Ambassador Danon described personal details of the victims: “Among the killed was a 25-year-old who had immigrated from Spain, recently married and building a future in Israel…. Among the wounded was a woman eight months pregnant, left to fight for her life and the life of the unborn child.” By presenting the victims’ personal profiles, Ambassador Danon emphasized Hamas’s inhumanity as justification for Israel’s broader military campaign, including airstrikes on Doha.

When confronted with such painful experiences, nations and identity groups face a crossroads: they may strike back with force—framed as self-defense, deterrence, or retaliation—or choose to address the deeper historical and relational causes of violence systematically. Retaliation assumes that our suffering uniquely justifies escalation, while theirs—less than ours—does not, and that our resolve to strike back is stronger than the opponent’s. After all, aren’t we more human than they are?

Choosing conflict resolution through dialogue, by contrast, requires a moral courage distinct from the warrior’s ethos of striking back. Yet it is the path that can, when taken effectively, ultimately break cycles of revenge that bind all sides in prolonged, shared suffering. The question I, like many others deeply concerned with the region’s pain, would pose is this: Which statesmen—and which diplomatic, military, religious, academic, media, and civil society leaders—demonstrate the towering courage and historic foresight to stand up and choose genuine dialogue? Who will take on the difficult yet necessary task of elevating regional consciousness so that future generations can affirm that the suffering of one side is inseparable from the suffering of all sides?

Seasoned statesmen, diplomats, and political analysts with intimate knowledge of the region’s history may dismiss this as unrealistic. Yet these are precisely the kinds of questions that many ordinary citizens I have met in conflict-affected communities across the region—such as parents caring for their children’s future and youths striving to fulfill their dreams—expect their leaders to confront courageously and honestly. I would also ask: Since when have we come to accept as normal that the goals of high-level diplomacy and government decision-making, including at the UNSC, may diverge from ordinary people’s heartfelt desire to escape suffering?

To illustrate how inquiries into human suffering and dialogue might enter the formal discourse of diplomacy and policymaking, I return to the UNSC meeting of September 11. As customary, the session consisted of prepared statements—Israel defending its position and others condemning or criticizing Israel’s actions. Yet it remained unclear what representatives—and the global audience watching the session—actually learned about restoring regional security and promoting peacebuilding. More specifically:

What common threads emerged beyond the apparent majority support for Qatar? What areas of dissensus demand urgent attention? What perspectives remained absent but deserve consideration? Did any participants reconsider their positions after listening to others, and if so, how? What practical steps, if any, were identified toward preventing future attacks, providing reparations for losses and damages, achieving a ceasefire, and ultimately resolving the underlying conflict, beyond merely reiterating the desirability of a two-state solution? In short, it was unclear how the collective learning of the national delegates evolved during the meeting to advance regional security and peace, beyond simply reading prepared statements and debating predetermined positions.

Admittedly, the formality of UNSC proceedings does not readily allow such questions to be raised, let alone answered. Exploratory discussions of this kind may be better suited for informal, small-group settings outside globally televised meetings, where face-saving is paramount. Yet for the improvement of UN-led global governance, it is worth asking: What if a skilled and experienced facilitator—potentially the UN Secretary-General or an Under-Secretary-General—devoted at least part of the session to facilitating dialogue?

Depending on the context, possible tasks for the appointed facilitator, who may work with the UNSC president in monthly rotation, could include opening the session with a minute of silence to honor the human lives lost in the context of the inquiry, summarizing perspectives raised by the representatives, seeking further input on underlying needs, articulating emerging questions that require collective attention, identifying promising areas for problem-solving and consensus-building, and deepening dialogue under shared ground rules. One such rule could be as simple as turning off mobile phones—a modest yet powerful gesture of mutual respect and attentiveness. If schoolchildren and university students can do this in classrooms, why shouldn’t diplomats and statesmen do the same in consequential meetings that shape humanity’s future?

Likely objections include: “Government representatives must follow instructions from above—thus presumably requiring some of them to keep their mobile phones on—and cannot reveal how dialogue may have shifted their perspectives.” My response: How about delegates publishing and exchanging their written statements on the designated UN website in advance, reflecting with their authorities as needed, and arriving prepared for meaningful dialogue? Even three hours of skillfully facilitated dialogue could yield new insights to advance peace, security, and alleviate suffering in concrete, practical terms.

Having conducted dozens of diplomatic trainings and workshops myself, I am deeply convinced that these procedural innovations, supported by purposeful leadership in facilitation, would significantly enhance collective problem-solving capacity over time through cumulative practice and experience in respectful and inspiring dialogue.

Much of this innovation has historically fallen on “Track II” leaders who convene unofficial channels across social divides. But when the space for Track II initiatives is so severely restricted as in the ongoing war in Gaza and the broader Middle East today, innovations for genuine dialogue must also occur at the highest levels of diplomacy and government decision-making.

What may now appear to be an impossibly high bar for diplomatic and policy innovation could, in retrospect, prove manageable when the region faces its next unprecedented crisis—as it did in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and in Doha on September 9, 2025. In today’s interconnected world, the accelerating pace of multidimensional security crises can be increasingly dangerous, unpredictable, and unknowable, especially in the age of AI-powered warfare and growing nuclear threats.

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Tatsushi Arai is a peace researcher and conflict resolution practitioner with twenty-eight years of field experience in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development, Environment based in Ohio, USA. His books include Creativity and Conflict Resolution: Alternative Pathways to Peace and Functional Coexistence in Socio-Political Conflict: Enabling Social Change Across Decades (co-edited with M. Tadevosyan). Email: tats0919@gmail.com Website: https://works.bepress.com/tatsushi_arai/

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 15 Sep 2025.

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One Response to “On Human Suffering and Dialogue: Lessons from the 11 Sep 2025 UNSC Mtg. Regarding Israel’s Airstrikes on Doha”

1. Suryanath Prasad says:

   15 Sep 2025 at 14:49

   A Wrap-up Speech
   Dialogue among Civilizations for Peace
   CONFLICT RESOLUTION – MEDIATION, 9 Jul 2018
   By Surya Nath Prasad, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
   https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/07/dialogue-among-civilizations-for-peace/
   The paper is based on A Wrap-up Speech delivered by Dr. Surya Nath Prasad on 27 September 2001 at the UN Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations and the 20th Anniversary of the UN Intl. Day of Peace, organized by International Association of University Presidents (IAUP) and Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea

   Reply