We are all Israel and Gaza

“It is vicious barbarity by Hamas in response to even more serious, vicious barbarity by the Israeli government,” was my first thought that came to mind.

I find Hamas’s action repugnant in its atrocity and senselessness. I can only understand it as an evil expression of hatred, revenge, despair and powerlessness accumulated over eight decades. And I shudder to think that this will only aggravate the pain and prolong the weeping of their elderly, young adults and children, and dig the graves of their people. And leaving their allies high and dry.

I find it even more difficult to understand the extreme violence, the inhumane, such long-lasting oppression, which many Israeli governments, the current one of Benjamin Netanyahu more than any other, have systematically brought to bear and still bring to bear on the Palestinian people. I can only understand it as an expression of high-handedness, legitimised in the most irrational religious beliefs and supported by the hypocritical complicity of more than a few Western countries, with the United States at the forefront.

I look at Gaza, at the whole of the Middle East, cradle of civilisations and crossroads of trade and wars, I look at Haiti the forgotten, at Africa the martyr, at Eastern Europe, at the nearby Mediterranean…, at our rights and our stock markets primed for war. And I am overcome with sorrow. Can there be hope for a species unable to contain, to temper its greed for power, its fears and hatreds? Poor Homo Sapiens.

Can there be hope for Gaza and for Palestine as a whole? I can only see that hatred and massacre are not the way. Will Israel be able to live in peace and security? No, it will never be able to do so, as long as it denies its Palestinian brothers the real possibility of living in dignity.

We are all Israel and Gaza. We are children of the same wounded earth. We are driven by the same dream of a liberated life in fellowship. We cannot deny what we are. The earth and life are urging us before it is too late to sit down at the same table to share the bread and the word of fraternity and of universal sisterhood with its profound joy. Is this not the germ of the divinity that we are, the inexhaustible, infinite possibility that dwells at the heart of the cosmos and in our poor human hearts?

Aizarna (Basque Country), 11 October, 2023

(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)