Life & Mortality Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Hertzberg reaches for a brutally linear explanation: drain hope from a generation and you eventually get violence with a theology attached. Coming from a theologian, that phrasing matters. He is not primarily diagnosing strategy or ideology; he is diagnosing spiritual and civic atmosphere. The sentence turns on “born into the world,” a deliberately universal frame that shifts blame away from innate evil and toward the conditions adults build and tolerate. The shocking bluntness of “they become murderers” and “they become suicide bombers” is meant to collapse the comfortable distinction between ordinary crime and politically freighted terror. Both, in his telling, are downstream of the same drought.

The subtext is moral accusation disguised as social analysis. “A large part of the problem” signals he’s not excusing perpetrators, but he is indicting the systems that manufacture despair: occupation, statelessness, poverty, humiliation, and the daily pedagogy of seeing no future. Hope here isn’t a vague feeling; it’s a forecast. If you can’t imagine a life that gets better, death can start to look like agency, and martyrdom can look like meaning.

There’s also an implied critique of audiences who treat “suicide bomber” as an alien species rather than an endpoint of a continuum. Hertzberg’s intent is to make the reader uncomfortable with purely punitive responses. Security measures may interrupt attacks, but they won’t refill the reservoir he’s talking about. The line dares policymakers and community leaders to treat hope as infrastructure, not sentiment: jobs, dignity, political horizons, and narratives that make living feel more powerful than dying.