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The lamplight glowed in the quiet house, carving out a small island of peace in the vast, dark sea of the world’s news. Emil sat, the images from his phone screen—rubble, soldiers, tear-streaked faces—burned onto the back of his eyes. The grandfather’s framework was a powerful lens, but could it actually focus on something as vast and bloody as the war in Ukraine?

“Grandfather,” he began, his voice hesitant. “Your words today… they make sense. But I need to understand them here. Now.” He tapped the news feed on his tablet. “Ukraine. Russia. They have been fighting for years. A pro-Russian president was toppled, Russia called it a coup, they took Crimea, and now… this. Thousands dead. Cities destroyed. How do the Four Absences explain this? And how could an ‘arson investigator’ have stopped it?”

The old man listened, his face a mask of deep sorrow. He did not speak for a long time, gathering his thoughts like a surgeon selecting his tools.

“The Four Absences do not take sides, Emil,” he said finally. “They are not a way to assign blame. They are a diagnostic tool to understand the disease in the room. And in this conflict, the disease is present on all sides. An arson investigator does not care which match was struck first; he cares about the conditions that allowed the fire to catch.”

He tapped the table, four times, steady as a heartbeat.

“Absence One: Wisdom. ‘This land is eternally and exclusively ours.’
“This is the primary fuel. For Russia, it is the myth of historical destiny—that Ukraine is not a sovereign nation but ‘Little Russia,’ a part of its own sphere of influence, its buffer against the West. For a more nationalist Ukraine, it is the myth of a purely Ukrainian identity that must be purified of Russian influence. Both are stories of exclusive ownership. Both ignore the tangled, shared, and painful history that actually binds the people of that region together. They chose a story of separation over a reality of connection.”

“Absence Two: Values. ‘Justice collapses into vengeance.’
“Look at the language. For one side, ‘justice’ is the punishment of ‘Nazis’ and the taking of Russian-speaking territories. For the other, it is the ‘just’ retaking of all occupied land, whatever the cost. Mercy—for civilians caught in the middle, for soldiers, for the possibility of compromise—is treated as weakness. Trust is annihilated, it is ash. Nothing left to build on but the rubble of the last broken agreement.”

“Absence Three: Humanity. ‘The neighbor becomes a slur.’
“This is the deepest wound, and the most visible. A Ukrainian is not a person with a family and a history; he is a ‘Nazi,’ a ‘Banderite.’ A Russian is not a confused conscript or a citizen opposed to the war; he is an ‘orc,’ a ‘rashist.’ The face erased—restraint erased with it. This is why bombs fall on hospitals, why theaters sheltering children become targets. Without faces, anything is possible.”

“Absence Four: Awareness. ‘Instincts twist into cries we refuse to hear.’
“Russia’s violent act is called ‘security’—a distorted, brutal hunger for recognition and permanence on the world stage, a terrified reaction to the perceived encroachment of NATO. Ukraine’s fierce resistance is called ‘terrorism’ by the Kremlin—a refusal to hear it as a distorted cry for national dignity, sovereignty, and safety from its much larger neighbor. Neither side can see the legitimate fear and desire for security that motivates the other; they only see the distorted, violent expression of it.”

Emil sat, stunned by the brutal clarity of it. “So… it’s everyone’s fault?”

“No,” Grandfather said sharply. “Diagnosis is not the same as assigning equal moral blame. One side is the clear aggressor. But the conditions for this fire were built by both sides, and by the world around them, for decades. The arson investigator’s job is to see the whole tinderbox, not just the one who lit the match.”

“Then what would the investigator have done?” Emil pressed. “It’s too late for diagnosis. The fire is burning.”

“It is never too late for diagnosis,” the old man replied. “For it is the only thing that points to the cure. The fire brigade is at work—the sanctions, the weapons, the UN resolutions. They are trying to contain the blaze. But the investigators would be working on a different track entirely.”

He laid out the blueprint:

“First, they would have insisted on naming the fears, not the enemies. Before a single tank rolled, they would have forced a table where each side had to answer one question: ‘What are you truly afraid of?’ Not ‘What do you demand?’ but ‘What are you so terrified of that you are willing to destroy for it?’
“Second, they would have created impossible, neutral spaces. A permanent, open channel for communication, not for negotiation, but purely for the technical coordination of civilian safety, prisoner swaps, and nuclear plant security. They would build tiny threads of practical cooperation to prove that not every interaction must be zero-sum.
“Third, they would have invested in the future, not the front. Right now, the world invests billions in weapons. The investigator would have already launched an international fund for the post-war reconstruction of both Ukraine and the impoverished regions of Russia that suffer under this war. They would be designing the blueprint for peace so clearly, so tangibly, that it becomes more real than the war.
“And most importantly,” Grandfather said, his voice dropping to a whisper, “they would be speaking to the people, not the governments. Broadcasting the same message into both nations: ‘Your pain is seen. Your dead are ours. Your children’s future is being stolen for a old man’s fantasy and a general’s pride. You are not orcs. You are not Nazis or terrorists. You are humans, and we will remember you when this madness ends.’”

He looked at Emil, his eyes filled with a profound, weary love for a world that refused to learn.

“The arson investigator could not have single-handedly stopped the war, Emil. But they could have planted the seeds of the peace that must eventually follow. They would be ensuring that when the fire brigade finally puts the flames out, the world does not just leave a charred wasteland, but is ready to plant a forest whose roots are so deep and so intertwined that no one could ever tear them apart again.”

The room fell silent. The problem felt too big, the solution too slow.

Emil fell silent, the grandfather’s words echoing. And then, another fire, ever-present on his screen, flared in his mind. A fire even more contentious, even more ancient. He spoke again, his voice quieter, more hesitant.

“And… Gaza?” The word hung in the air, heavy with unspeakable images. “How does the investigator see that? Where one side’s ‘justice’ is called ‘genocide’ by the other? Where a child is a ‘terrorist,’ a hospital is a ‘command center,’ and a journalist’s death is a ‘regrettable accident’? Where does the diagnosis even begin?”

The grandfather closed his eyes, as if physically pained by the question. He did not answer immediately. The silence itself was an answer—a recognition of the profound, tragic complexity.

“It begins,” he said, his voice a low whisper, “in the exact same place. The investigator must first acknowledge the absolute, human truth: that a Palestinian child is a child. An Israeli grandparent is a grandparent. That their grief weighs the same. Any language that makes them weigh less… is the language of the Absences.”

He opened his eyes, and they were filled with a deep, weary sorrow. “The investigator then applies the same ruthless diagnosis, without fear or favor:

• Absence One (Wisdom): ‘This land is eternally and exclusively ours.’ Two peoples, one land. Two stories of exclusive, divinely-ordained ownership. A zero-sum game where one’s gain must be the other’s loss. The investigator would ask: ‘Can a new story be written? One of shared sovereignty, of co-existence, instead of exclusive possession?’
• Absence Two (Values): ‘Justice collapses into vengeance.’ When does a justified right to self-defense mutate into a collective punishment that is itself a war crime? When does a righteous struggle for liberation curdle into the murder of innocents? The investigator sees both happening, in a horrific feedback loop of violence, each side using the other’s atrocity to justify its own escalation.
• Absence Three (Humanity): ‘The neighbor becomes a slur.’ This is the most visible wound. ‘Terrorist.’ ‘Zionist.’ ‘Amalek.’ ‘Human animal.’ The erasure of the face is nearly total. This is why the restraint is gone. This is why the world watches in horror. It is the ultimate proof of the grandfather’s axiom: Once the face is erased, restraint is erased with it.
• Absence Four (Awareness): ‘Instincts twist into cries we refuse to hear.’ The investigator would ask: Is Hamas’s violence a distorted, monstrous cry from a people living in an open-air prison for decades? Is Israel’s brutal response a distorted, traumatized cry from a people who have known persecution for millennia and will never again be victims? The investigator’s job is to hear the legitimate fear and pain inside the distorted, violent action—not to excuse the action, but to understand its source to eventually remove it.”

The old man looked utterly drained. “The fire there is so old, the ashes so deep, that the investigator’s work seems impossible. But it is the only work. The fire brigade—the UN, the US, the EU, the Arab states—only contains the blaze for a time. The investigator must be the one to say the unbearable thing: that both peoples have a right to exist, to safety, to dignity, on that same sliver of land. And that until that is the starting point, the fuel will never run out.”

Emil sat, humbled into silence. The scale of the pain was overwhelming. The work of the investigator felt like trying to hold back the ocean with his hands.

The grandfather saw his despair and placed a hand on his shoulder. “You asked what the investigator would do. They would do the same thing here as everywhere: speak the human truth that everyone ignores. They would be building the blueprint for the peace that must come, even now, especially now. They would be the voice, however small, that says: ‘This is not security. This is not justice. This is a sickness. And we must diagnose it to have any hope of a cure.’”

Emil looked down at his hands. They seemed small. But they could hold a trowel. They could plant. They could tend. He was not a general. Not a firefighter.

But he could be a gardener. He could ready the ground where the fire would one day burn out.

And that, he finally understood, was the only work that ever lasted.