Thoughts on Palestine

A Peace-worker finds grounds for compassion on both sides. In these two communities we have people who are Occupied in two different ways. As Allen Ginsberg put it, "They are the two children of the same hook-nosed God."

I don't think Peace, or even national defense, can come from the imagination of the enemy’s evil. Peace comes from seeing good where good was hidden, and urging it out into the public air with more power than bombs. Gentleness needs to go everywhere, into every basement and attic, along the cracks in prayer walls and floors, out to the edge of every tree-branch. Peace is hard work. Starting it is like massaging a rock.

Part of the despair we feel is that political leaders don't bring out that gentle good. They seem partnered in a death duet with the commercial media - who shame the goodness away, preferring anguish and videogenic fear. What about the visceral goodness of loved ones for each other - say, a mother for her child who is safe at home. How is the deep recognition we can have for that love - how is that care made public? Kept public. Pushed across every desk and up every gun barrel? But we now fetishize (in fact PAY TO SEE, like porn) the horror-moment when that strongest of all bonds of love is broken by unexpected death. That’s on the fronts of newspapers on the table in front of me right now. This is entertainment? This is news? The shock of the death of a child that was loved? That amazed expression of that child's parents?

But we didn’t feature the love that preceded this shock. The unbearable cease-fire in Gaza preceded it, with the love there hidden out of sight. Now, I am a consumerized American, so I am behind my own wall and suffer from perspective distortions. I must remember that the cease-fire was colonization and that Americans and most other people refuse to live that way, and we certainly embraced a warrior and martyr culture when faced with it. But then, the love in Israel and American families preceded these attacks too, and that goodness couldn’t enter Gaza and manifest as Peace, either. The love would have to grow from both sides and dissolve the wall. If we HAD found and studied and made more powerful the love on both sides of the wall FIRST, then the outrageous logic that brings this carnage wouldn't have it's critical mass of political approval.

How is it that the tenderness, the tone of peaceful love, evolved in two directions, became separated and finally foreign on the two sides of the wall? How did that happen? The cultures keep the birthing and mothering far away, as far away as possible. The missiles and young conscripts cross the border to do their duty and be glorious. But mothers and their children are the best place to start a Peace process - more effective than discussions of borders, guns, and inspections. All those details should flow from goodwill already established. Most of the Peace in the world is powerful while it is unspoken. The murder of civilians doesn't occur to anyone as an option. But now we have no Peace leaders anymore, and the cultivation of such silence, the caring for the very young as the first fact of life, that single thing that should overwhelm even a Holocaust and a Catastrophe, is stopped at our tragic border.

Wouldn't most mothers say - "Go into rooms and throw shoes at each other. Yes, but no guns."

Now Peace must be re-introduced somehow. We have to be those leaders ourselves, don't we... We do have that feeling our mothers and our children and our peaceful homes. We remember this, don’t’ we? – that visceral love - from our early lives. So we do have the substance that makes Peace, we carry it in us. It can push through these walls we face more easily than a bullet. Amen?

--- God! This is awful. We need to stop killing these children NOW.