Briar Rose Fantasy

I hear the horrors on the news and on my podcasts of the invasion and bombardment of Gaza.  Because it is so far removed from my every day experience, I can only voice my dismay before I turn to other more mundane thoughts.  A few minutes ago, I listened to the story of Suleiman Baraka, an astrophysicist living and working in the United States who recently learned of the death if his 11 year old from an Israeli bombing of his home, on Democracy Now podcast.  His home was destroyed, his surviving family now homeless, perhaps without food and clean water.  I am welling up just writing this.  I ask what more can I do sitting in my office a world away to help these people?  My heart breaks as I listened to his story and later near the end of the program his brother’s story of what happened that day.  Their accent and poor English made it difficult to understand fully their words, but the emotion and the pain was evident enough.  Their story brings the plight of the Palestinian people imprisoned in Gaza by the Israeli blockade to light in the way that no other story, statistic, or pundit could ever express.

When he told the story of his son telling Suleiman to take care of himself, my tears flowed more freely.  When his brother told how he was the one to give his nephew the first kiss but was unable to give him the last kiss, I felt my heart break for this family.

I don’t have any answers, nor do I know enough about the complexities of the situation in the Middle East.  I lack the understanding of the culture of the region’s people.  All I know is that when Rashid Khalidi said there is no justification for the killing of children at the end of today’s program, he spoke truth.  I don’t know how to fix it, all I know is that what Israel is doing to these people is wrong.  That by the definition of terrorism, Israel is behaving as terrorists; committing an act of violence on civilians for political means.