As a follow-on to his article about the Haifa suicide bomber, John Burns of the New York Times describes how the war has effected peoples on both sides.
“To sojourn in the Holy Land these days is to be pitched into a miasma of mutual political recriminations, of action and reprisal, of a spiral of mutual dehumanization and cruelty, of violence and counterviolence, all to a point that sanity and compassion seem at risk of being lost. Yet traveling around Israel and the West Bank, there is every day the feeling that little of this proceeds from what ordinary people on both sides believe or want. It is as if many of the nine million people directly involved in the conflict, Jew and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian, are trapped in a moral and political maze that assures deepening misery for both, as if they are bound to a journey without comprehensible purpose, without expectable end.”
Of course, there is an end. But that end requires both people to let go of militaristic national myths and pursue egalitarian democratic ideals. Perhaps when the suffering becomes unedurable, people will realize how deeply they have been misled by their base instincts which are manipulated by callous leaders.
