WHAT is happening in Lebanon has brought unprecedented reactions from around the world, and not without reason. The very way Israel has bombed the country with apparent enthusiasm cannot be justified in any way.
To fire at guerilla fighters and militants would be understandable since the Israeli Defence Forces say they are targeting the Hezbollah.
But must they include bombing houses where civilian families live? What have the babies and children in these families done? What danger did the unarmed men and women pose when they were neither militants nor soldiers?
The United Nations stays paralysed. And the world watches in horror, just as paralysed. For every minute we stay just looking on, there is yet another child killed, another woman injured, another man maimed.
Thus far, countries have expressed their horror or sympathy by issuing statements. But statements are made up of words and words are of little comfort to a mother who has lost her baby, or to a man whose son lies dead beneath the rubble of what was once their home.
Words do not bring the dead back.
As of today, about a million people have fled from the south of Lebanon to escape Israeli bombardment. Over 85,000 people are staying in public schools in Beirut, with 20 or more people sleeping in one classroom.
A reader e-mailed photos of Lebanese babies and children who had been killed by Israeli bombs to me. There was, among them, a picture of doctors holding up a baby with a bullet hole on its back, the crater-like shape of bloodied flesh looking all the more horrific because it looked so big on a body so tiny. There were also pictures of children, grey from being covered in rubble, sand and dust, their eyes shut but not from sleep.
If we, from afar, shed tears looking at such pictures, imagine how many thousand times more is the pain that the parents of these children feel.
How do you take away a child from his parents without taking away a part of their hearts and souls? How does a mother look on her dead baby, one whom she had fed and bathed, one who had smiled at her with complete love and trust, without feeling her very heart being ripped out?
Whether a person comes from a little kampung or a busy city, whatever the colour of our skins and our faiths, what binds us all is the fact that our hearts get broken when we are hurt. Our hearts break even more when we are powerless to protect our children.
Imagine – you and I, men and women who become anxious when our children have colds or a slight fever – the depth of suffering of the men and women in Lebanon whose children are dead, their little limbs torn and bloodied.
The bombing of a village in Qana caused the deaths of 54 civilians, 37 of them children. The buildings which were bombed housed refugees who had fled their own villages and cities.
I believe that we should not mimic the cruelty of the Israeli Defence Forces but instead strongly advocate peace, even while those who prefer aggression and violence march on.
Indeed, we must not only condemn those who have acted unjustly and cruelly – as the Israelis have done – but also look for others who seek peace and understanding as much as we do.
If we give in to our feelings of anger and hatred, then we would be no better than the Israeli soldiers who dropped bombs and missiles onto the unarmed and innocent civilians of Lebanon. We must show mercy where they have been merciless. Difficult though it may be, we must rise above anger and hatred to prove that we are different: that we are capable of kindness while they have shown cruelty.
With this in mind – that there must be others around the world, especially from the Middle East itself, who wish to see peace – what I found on the Internet made me wonder if there is just that tiny flicker of hope.
One of the websites I found described a conference of imams and rabbis called “Rabbis and Imams for Peace” that took place on Jan 21, 2005, in Brussels, Belgium. Those who participated included imams from Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Nigeria and Palestine, and rabbis from Austria, France, Israel, Morocco, Norway, Romania and the Czech Republic.
There were about a hundred in total who attended the conference. At the first session, Dr Abdul Abad from Palestine said: “If we see the Holy Land as a wife, we will each say ‘she is my wife’, and we will continue to fight one another for the right to claim her. My friends, let us see the Holy Land not as a wife to claim, but as our mother – so that we may live in peace as brothers …”
At another discussion during this conference, a rabbi spoke about his experiences while living in a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Although surrounded by approximately one million Arabs, he had made no effort to have Muslim friends. The only contact he had was with Arab taxi drivers. Once, while being driven in a taxi, he asked the Arab driver to stop so he could do a brief ritual washing and then a short prayer.
When they stopped, he noticed that the taxi driver had also come out of the car and was washing himself too, but while he stood facing north towards Jerusalem, the Arab driver faced south towards Mecca. The rabbi realised that “One prays in one manner; another in a different manner. One prays in one direction; the other prays in a different direction. But we are all united on this tiny world …”
Do our hopes for an end to the suffering of the peoples in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon lie in the hands of religious men such as the imams and rabbis who attended this conference?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. Rabbis and imams do not make the ultimate decisions. The ones who do are those who have been elected to power. They are the ones who are in control of the military forces. So far, no leader of any country in Europe has been bold enough to come forward and say to the Israelis, “Stop, this cannot go on.”
If only the present president of America could be persuaded to realise that war is hell, as described by the famous American general, General William Sherman, who fought during the American Civil War: “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
America is Israel’s ally and protector; we know that. But are we really expected to believe that the Lebanese babies and children who have been killed are Israel’s enemies?
6 August 2006 : The Star, Mind Matters
