Posted bcc to the select few. For your edification, elucidation and education but delete if not impressed!
VERY BAD NEIGHBOURS indeed!
Trauma for Israel with 4,500 rockets from Gaza, said Prof Gerald Steinberg. Presenter, Matt Frei drily observed, “I was in Gaza and it was traumatic to see 12 storey apartment blocks reduced to one storey with entire families dying within them.”
Gerald was on LBC radio last Thursday morning, 3 June. He was eloquent, self-assured, easily able to demolish every pertinent point put to him. Above all, he shared the State of Israel's comfortable stance of sitting pretty with Israel and the rich West in the dominant, all-powerful position as top dog. In other words, nothing has changed in 73 years of the endless cycle of asymmetric warfare and death for one side only (not quite). And they don’t want anything to change. An inability to live in justice and peace with their neighbour because they always come out of it best - indeed victorious with their neighbour vanquished.
However, it reminds me of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Hatred between Jews and Samaritans lasted for 800 years. The present hatred between Jews and Palestinians has only lasted 73 years. In the story, Jesus, a Jew told a story putting his own side down and making the hero, shockingly, his 'nation's' very worst enemy - a Samaritan!
Could the Jewish Jesus be speaking to both sides today, especially to his own tribe and tongue? Wanting his own people to be good neighbours like the Samaritan and NOT like the robbers easily beating up the man of whom we know nothing. But, could the man stand for any victim of war, of aggression, of environmental degradation and of man’s inhumanity to man? Could the beaten-up man even stand for the Gazans who are losing out, big time with nothing ever being done to stop their slaughter and loss of human decency, dignity and of land?
Can Israel change from robbing the Gazans and Palestinians of everything, even life itself for some, to becoming more like the Good Samaritan?
Can the Big Powerful Wealthy Magnificent Seven, actually be the G7 Good Samaritan to sort out the seven decades of stalemate, injustice, oppression and loss of land for the People With Nothing - and nothing to lose?
If you want to understand a smidgeon of the world's most fraught and intractable dispute for 73 years, listen to LBC Catch Up on Global Player. Thursday 3 June with Matt Frei for the last one hour. The app counts down from 0:55:48. A decent, dispassionate, unemotional debate between a professor and a bookseller! Brilliant stuff.
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