And we have just one world but we live in different ones… absent-mindedly I am listening to a Dire Straits playlist when,  suddenly, I cannot let go of the serious drubbing I recently experienced at the hands of my 25- and 15-year-old daughters. Did I deserve such a mauling? It had all started with the Eurovision Song Contest. What else?! Ah yes, the spark must have been the serial abuse of the word free during Israel’s rendition.

After a light skirmish, there you have it. “We will spend our lifetime undoing the disasters created by your generation and the ones before you,” chimed in my daughters, flushed with indignation. “I hope you’re not being serious,” was all I managed. The gloves came off.

It was a melee of the woke phrases, with which we are all justifiably familiar. Intolerance, racism, fascism, human slaughter, dolphin slaughter, whale slaughter and tree slaughter even, overdevelopment, uglification, concrete jungles and gaping holes in the ozone layer. You mention it. We probably spat bile over it. The reader may justly question the reason why I should be ruminating over a family row. This one struck me as existential. Are we so bad and why?

The Middle East has, since time immemorial, been a multi-ethnic powder keg, an erratic pendulum swinging between raging war and, more commonly, a seething threat thereof. This region saw the first human beings walk out of East Africa, establish civilisation and then spread to every corner of this earth. This land of milk and honey is the oft-contested birthplace of mammoth religions.

The region has been an unresolved diplomatic quagmire for a very long time. A young and probably frustrated Winston Churchill dreamily toyed with the dangerous idea of a massive caliphate to pacify it. A century later, his grandiose plans would have made ISIS gloat with greed. The post-World War II population displacement and failed diplomacy put paid to an amicable solution. The truth of the matter is that

Israel is established as a mighty democratic enclave in an Arab cocoon. There is no love lost between bitter enemies.

Israel is supremely geared for survival. Etched in the national psyche is the grim determination to survive and do well at all costs.

This people cannot remotely countenance the possibility of exile, persecution, the pogroms suffered at the hands of most regimes in the Middle East and Europe. From the Philistines, Nebuchadnezzar, the Caesars, Plantagenets, the Bourbons, to their most recent arch-tormentor, the murderous Nazi state. Does this disturbing history justify the rough wooing (to borrow a term from middle-age Britain) meted out to the Palestinian population?

Conflict claims the innocent lives of countless civilians and children are never spared. One thing that my generation learnt is that a surgical air strike is a whimsical euphemism for general slaughter, just like, for past generations, delousing stood for gas chamber and re-settlement meant ethnic cleansing.

Why do rational beings choose to resort to barbarism and atrocity?- Jo Etienne Abela

I was born in 1975 and, for as long as I can remember, the Middle East crisis has peppered news reels the world over. The 1993 iconic image of a beaming Bill Clinton, flanked by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, is imprinted in the memory of my generation. Years before, in 1945 there was another iconic image of Big Three fraternity at Yalta, which only paved the way for the Cold War.

And, a few years before that, in 1938, the image of Neville Chamberlain waving a ridiculous waste of paper, the Munich peace accord signed by Adolf Hitler. Peace for our time, indeed! Not to mention, of course, what had come before that – the Treaty of Versailles and the Peace of Amiens and the Treaty of Rastatt, and so on and so forth.

Past generations have, very often, failed to honour peace treaties. Why should my daughters and the rest of us expect better from future generations?

Writing a few years after the death of St Paul, Tacitus was a privileged Roman citizen born in Gaul. One of his histories unabashedly trashes conquest and dominion. He uses the, almost certainly apocryphal, Scottish (Caledonian) freedom fighter Calgacus as his mouthpiece. He laments that the only way to escape the mighty is to obey and submit, a contradiction in terms. Ominously, he concludes that tyrants just create desolation and call it peace. A harsh bill of indictment.

But let us think for a moment. What would our civilisation be like without the steering influence of the bellicose ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols and Chinese, the Ottoman, the Spanish conquest of South America, the British incursions into North America and Australia, the French in North Africa? The question we don’t seem to be able to answer is: why do rational beings such as us, at the turning point in history, choose to resort to barbarism and atrocity?

Too many times, the human species has resolved to be the absolute master of ruthless ambition by any means. Can we just shed this heritage of ours and become decent beings once and forever more? Past generations were not deterred to trample over fellow human beings, and their habitat, in order to achieve their goals.

Will future generations, armed with their high-flying education, enhanced connectivity, developed notions of tolerance, empathy and respect for the environment, be better than us?

I do sincerely hope so but only time will tell. It is certain, however, that they do not stand much chance unless their leaders learn the crucial lessons of history.

Jo Etienne Abela, consultant surgeon