Human, All Too...

In response to my xposting of the Paul Neman entry at this forum, I received a truly authentic response to my words. A response that contains within it the beating heart of a war that will not die. ...

At that site, Dan responded:

It sure wasn't Newman who came off the Exodus and contributed to Israel's survival: he was much too well-fed. It was people like my mother, a petite Polish Holocaust survivor of 21, who like the other passengers was shipped back to camps in Germany after the Brits rammed the Exodus, eventually found her way back to Israel, joined the Air Force and took part in the 1948-9 war. That's who made up Israel and its military: refugees from genocide and their children and grandchildren.

In response to Dan's words, I wrote:

And who did they believe they were killing? It is heartbreaking to hear stories like this and realize that those who suffer the most horrible injustice can turn around and commit injustice of their own.

Of course they were escaping oppression--the most bestial kind. Yet why then not live in peace with peoples who had also been ground under the heel of oppressors--the Turks and then the western imperialists?

How tragic. How human.

The situation in Israel/Lebanon can break your heart, if not your spirit. But to stay at the tragic level is to attempt the heroic. The terror and violence that chews up humans on both sides of the Mideast crisis does not require heroes. The times demana simple men and women who refuse to kill in the name of false ideologies, land, God, or anything else.

We must indeed regain a humanity that demands the most of ourselves and as little as possible of others.