This morning I made a statement on someone's Comment Section about how I
felt about his latest entry to his Weblog. He was speaking of the
Israelis storming again into Jenin and other towns with their military
and tanks. I'm not sure exactly what I wrote, but it was about the
continued violence. He answered me that he agreed that the terrorism had
to stop. But he said moving in with tanks would not stop the terrorist
bombings. I would like to respond to Anthony and to address the problem
on this entry. To start with, most Americans know very little of the
history of this conflict. And I can tell you that it goes back more than
50 or so years ago and way before Israel became a Country. As far as
learning more about it , there is an excellent book entitled "What Went
Wrong", by Bernard Lewis. He is a scholar and professor of Near Eastern
Studies at Princeton University. There are a lot of other well written
books out there to read.(Meg, V.P at Blogger had a great list but
unfortunately I forgot her website) Amazon has all of them. Aside from
the history , the current facts are these. Tanks will not stop the
bombings. What they will do is to try to curtail the terrorist groups by
getting to the leaders and jailing them. The Israelis have done house to
house searches in the settlements to rout out their leaders. Of course
the Palestinians feel invaded. But there is no question that their
terrorist leaders are strongly supported. You can tell just from the
graffiti in the settlements. There are pipe bombings ,rocks and bottles
thrown at the soldiers all the time. The Israeli soldiers are not out
there to mass destroy the Palestinian population contrary to what CNN
has told you. Do you always trust the media? I do hope you don't. If I
were a soldier and someone was less than a few yards from me and was
about to throw a Molotov Cocktail at me what would I do? Should I let
him kill me? For those of you who have never been in a war, ask a
grandfather or anyone who is a war veteran, what it's like. It's easy
for all of us to sit on our Ivory thrones and make judgments from our
cushy existence. I am sorry, but it really ticks me off when all the
focus in the news is about how many palestinians were killed by
Israelis. You must FIRST be informed with the facts before you decide
what's going on. Think if we had more 9/11's, which will probably happen
again. Let's say we had about one a week. Given the size of this country
it may still not affect us though. But lets' just say we sit back and
just be scared when the next Bombing or terrorist act occurs. We listen
and pray and hope that it will end. What if it doesn't end? What if it
just keeps on going. One day you wake up and two of your cousins are
killed in Iowa because of a terror attack. You cry, you mourn, you pray.
You go to the funeral and your relatives tell you how awful the inside
of the bus looked. They explain to you of the pictures of the gore and
blood and body parts strewn in the street and in the bus. But you must
go on. Life goes on. The next week you hear in the news that they
toppled a highrise in downtown Chicago. Many,many lives are lost. But
still we must do nothing. No you say? We are expecting the Israelis to
sit on their butts and do absolutely nothing. Just imagine there are no
more checkpoints at the borders. Israelis pull out of every where. They
no longer try to rout out the terrorists. What is so difficult for most
of us to understand is that the situation as bad as it is would get much
worse. I do believe that Palestine has to have a country of it's own and
there are many Israelis who want that as well. They believe there should
be no more new settlements and that some may have to be shut down. But
this, unfortunately will not stop the terrorism. You have to understand
what is going on and why the terrorism would continue. It starts with
innocent young children who are brainwashed to believe that Israelis are
the devil and must be washed from the face of the earth. It is a known
fact that the hatred is propagated in the schools and in their
textbooks. That is why children grow up wanting to become suicide
bombers. They believe that Allah has called for it and they will go to
heaven for these deeds. Nowhere is it written in the Koran about
genocide or killing. You can ask any Muslim you know . Hatred can be
stopped. But I wish I could be more optimistic. Whatever the
circumstances were 100 years ago or what the history of that region
tells us, we have to know that if a child is taught hatred of a people,
an ethnic group or a nation, then the bloodshed will continue. There is
no other outcome. I have often thought I would like to see an exchange
of letters and correspondence between children of different nations to
understand each other better, and to bring them all closer to each
other. I know this exists because I went to an elementary school that had
a correspondence program with a sister city in Japan. I am Miss
Pollyanna here, but I wish there would be such a program between the
Israeli and the Palestinian children. Right now that's an impossibility.
These children will become the adults of tomorrow and will determine the
future of this world. There was an academy nominated documentary film
about an American Journalist who got a group of Israeli and Palestinian
children together. It was an amazing piece of journalism and was the
most astonishing when they finally got them all together for one long
day playdate. The saddest and most disheartening part was the sadness of
one of the Palestinian boys who cried at the end of the day because he
would not see his new friends again. I once heard a Palestinian
Journalist speak on the radio. He said he had hoped his little eight year
old son would eventually exchange e-mails with an Israeli boy. He said
that his hope vanished when his little boy came to him one day and said
he wanted a gun to kill Israelis. I welcome your comments and ideas,
Peach