I started my Sunday with two stories of brutality of the Israeli forces; one against Palestinian children walking peacefully with their mother, which will probably never hit your media. And the other against an Israeli peace activist, Nita Golan. But then a fresh breeze of hope arrived with the story of the reservist Ishai Rozen-Zvi who refuses to take part in occupation.
A few weeks ago there was a similar story of Gabi Wolfe. It is indeed these Israeli voices that should be heard loud and clear so as to prick the conscience of the Israeli government which has led its people to believe that security can only be guaranteed with an iron fist and acquisition of more and more land until the sky only is the limit for the Israeli border. So by the time I was through with reading my e-mail I did not have the stomach to go to church. I know my faith has sustained me all through those difficult times, but sometimes it becomes very difficult to face the Lord with too many Why’s. I remembered my friend Linda Sheppard the wife of a Presbyterian Pastor who wrote to me once during the Gulf War on a Sunday morning when she opted to sit and write rather than to go to church.
Her two sons were in the American Air Force. What if she had lost those boys in Iraq. For whom were they really fighting that war?? I could feel her pain through her letters and our telephone calls. Thank heavens they were spared, but the suffering in the whole Middle East region continues. Why? because the politicians are at work. In our science and math classes in school we were taught that the shortest distance between two lines is a straight line. Well with politicians it is zig zag and round about the “bush”, which eventually never gets you there or anywhere!!!.
The story of our Nakbeh “catastrophe and dispossession” goes back to 1948. All the UN resolutions could not redress that dispossession until we reached to a worse stage in 1967. So new UN resolutions regarding the occupied Territories became the new issue. But then Jerusalem got annexed, so the issue became the illegality of that, but of course Israel implemented what ever it wished to implement and Jerusalem to them became “The united eternal capital of Israel” irrespective of the illegality. In the meantime the wave of the illegal settlements started and then the illegal settlements became the issue and an obstacle to peace but they stayed there, and the issue continues to be minimized at every stage and with every new fait a complis.
And after we had enough and cried out loud and clear through our Al-Aqsa intifada we are now blessed with a variety of missions and envoys to “stop the violence”. So the Palestine Question along the years has been watered down to “Stop the violence”. Even the UN General Secretary who has not been able to get any of the UN resolutions regarding the Palestinian rights implemented, finds himself caught in this zig zag and round the bush diplomacy, demanding the parties, mind you the parties (as if we were equal parties) to implement the Mitchell Report and the Tenet Document. Is this a joke???? What about that straight line. Illegal occupation means, Implementation of UN resolutions. Period. For heaven’s sakes go home all of you and please do not come back unless you have something honorable to offer. We had enough crumbs all along the last fifty three years. And what is more of a joke are the Arab summit Meetings and the follow up on those meetings. They would spare themselves the energy and money if they would pack and go home.
