I was in the office this afternoon, furtively Xeroxing page after page of a massive Arabic textbook, when Alex the accountant walked in and stated, rather matter-of-factly, “We’re at war.” Normally I would try to hide the fact that I was a) not working, and b) blatantly breaking the law, but this was big news. Copyright be damned—we’re at war!
The sick thrill of disaster wore off quickly once I read the online news updates, though. Technically, we’re not at war, at least not yet. An Israeli minister of something was quoted as saying (roughly) “Their actions are an aggressive act of war.” He was talking about Hezbollah militants kidnapping two soldiers at the Israel-Lebanon border, and he followed up his statement with the always-popular promise of escalated violence and a refusal to be diplomatic or rational in response.
The drama of violence and terror doesn’t seem so dramatic after a while when it’s a daily occurrence here. My high school psychology teacher taught me about the reticular activating system, the brain’s mechanism that tells you “Stop paying attention to the feeling of your Birkenstocks on your feet.” When there is a constant continuation of the same stimulus, the brain learns to focus on other things, things that change, things that vary.
So to hear that an Arab militant group has committed a violent act and the Israeli Defense Forces are responding without restrain doesn’t surprise me anymore. Let me rifle through my bag for a minute (and get a glass of orange juice while I’m near the kitchen) and pull out this report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It discusses the firing of Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. I know it’s been on the news and I know it’s a terrible thing, but so are the numbers in this report, which haven’t been as highly publicized. Between January 1 and June 20 of this year, 896 “homemade Palestinian rockets” have been fired into Israel. In retaliation, Israeli Defense Forces have fired 8,380 artillery shells into Gaza, and the Israeli Air Force has conducted 142 missile strikes. This is a ten-to-one ratio, and these are expensive, engineered rockets compared to the shop class Frankensteins that the Gazans are Duct taping together. (The fatality numbers also reflect the disparity.)
I still consider myself a pacifist and I still support all the organizations working over here that conduct non-violence trainings for Palestinian youth and adults. But the stories in the newspaper don’t ever seem to change, and I can’t figure out why no one makes the Israeli policy-makers take part in non-violence trainings. Palestinians aren’t allowed to form an army and they’re not allowed to own guns, yet Palestinian civilians are killed on a daily basis with none of the publicity that Israel receives when its citizens are the victims of a suicide bomber. Civilian killings seem to be okay if they’re committed by someone in a government-issued uniform.
The longer I’m over here the more convinced I am that it will decades if not centuries before an actual peace will be brokered. One side attacks and makes a demand. And rather than conceding, even when the lives of civilians and hostages are at stake, the other side just ups the ante and kills more people or arrests the government or does whatever they feel they need to do in order to look like the stronger side. We all know which is the stronger side—the death counts and the national economies attest to that. What this conflict needs is a side that gets bored after a while and tries something new, like trying.
One of the two trade school’s that our organization runs had their graduation ceremony last week. Twenty-four of the 88 graduates weren’t able to get through the Separation Wall and checkpoints to attend the ceremony. Their robes were laid on their chairs to symbolize their absence.
This is the valedictorian of sorts, a telecommunications graduate, who made the student speech. The girl peeking from behind the flag had a smattering of bruises around her eyes and nose. I feel like this photo is deeply layered with symbolism.
