Continued (Page Two) 👆🏼

Justice cannot be so limited that it acquires meaning only between “us” and “others”. Justice must include both “us” and “others” within a movement toward a better world. Justice becomes possible only when it stands above anger and the desire for destruction in exchange for destruction and death in exchange for death.

Hamas, in the name of justice, led hundreds of innocent human beings into death, and Israel, in the name of justice, has sent thousands of innocent people to death. Anyone who tries to place the boundary between good and evil between these two sides is forced to blind themselves to half of the truth.
Was the killing of hundreds of women and men at the Nova trance-music festival by Hamas forces a step toward justice?
What is painful is that many of those participating in that festival, which was organised around the theme of love and peace, were Israeli peace activists.
Telling the stories of those killed that day would require a narrative longer than this article can contain, but I will give only one example: a young man named Hayim Katsman, described here as having a doctorate in international relations on the historical proximity of Arabs and Jews, as a peace activist and fierce opponent of Israeli policies in the occupied territories, and as a member of an Israeli movement called “Protective Presence” supporting Palestinians. On the other side, Israel, alongside killing four Hamas leaders as described here, has in the name of revenge made hundreds of thousands homeless, sent thousands of innocent children, women and men to death, and left thousands of families carrying indescribable pain and suffering for the rest of their lives. It is as though Hamas were simply a group of individuals who, if destroyed, would solve everything for Israel—as though these same leaders had not themselves, a few decades earlier, been children and young people who might, in a different world, have lived different lives.

The result of the justice sought by both sides is only a heavy burden of hatred, distance and revenge placed upon the shoulders of the next generation. Each generation will become merely fuel for the continuation of this futile cycle of human ignorance unless it can imagine a larger picture of justice in its world.

The image above shows a group of Israeli and Palestinian midwives who came together in 2017 and made a commitment to peace. Their children played together at their first meeting and became friends in less than half an hour. The two women who organised the meeting were Aisha, a Palestinian woman from Gaza, who remembered hiding with her parents in a cave without water or food during the 1967 war, and Yifta, an Israeli woman whose father fought in that same war. They went beyond the narrow boundaries of the worlds of their fathers and mothers.

Thousands of gatherings and demonstrations have taken place around the world in support of one side or the other in this conflict. At a moment of such pervasive anger, the words of people like me—and perhaps you, who have watched this mad world in stunned and sorrowful silence over these past weeks—are marginal to a madness too extensive for us to influence deeply. But we can at least refuse to add to the burden of the problem and, however slightly, add weight to the solution for the generations who will come after us.