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I stand with Israel, I stand with Palestine: No, wrong answer I say!
Building a one state, confederative, bi-national solution based on our common Abrahamic roots and spiritual brotherhood
[Author’s note: This cathartic essay was started on October 29th 2023, inspired by that Sunday’s Gospel readings. With no background in political science, a few months of reflection and research on a conflict that has continued to unravel unrelentingly, has provided the author an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the potential and shape for peace]
Pain is everywhere. Anger is brewing. Emotions rule us. And Peace sadly seems an impossibility.
It has been more than a few weeks now, since that Sunday morning sermon. All I can do is reflect with a heavy heart, and experience a constant surge of emotions driven by thoughts about a conflict does not want to go away. It is a feeling of irrelevance and of human incapability, but never a sense of cold, desensitized, and impassionate indifference. No, the conflict is real, inescapable fueled by a quotidian stream of news, updates, mass commentary. It is a real moment of fear, another disturbing chapter of human darkness.
This morning I saw my wife, a preschool teacher, crying after seeing images of innocent children suffering, being carried away lifeless in graphic, improvised funerary processions. It does not matter whether these images were shot amidst the rubble of a Gaza City neighborhood, or the eerie alleys of a semi-abandoned Sderot in Southern Israel, both places of growing despair and desolation, unholy battlegrounds where opposing belligerent forces perpetuate spiraling cycles of ever greater violence, battle hardened actors that have self-legitimized and rationalized their sinful licenses to kill without pause. The Holy land, once again, has come to resemble Hell on Earth, instead of a place of common religious ancestry and deep shared significance, ancient experience. And while the material , widespread destruction and leveling of Gaza cities and communities is devastatingly real and manifest, the extent of the longer term, humanitarian impact on people, is perhaps, under-reported, partially understood and gauged by most of us who live in the relative safety our warm…
