Have We Had Enough Yet?

Where would Israel be today, if the world had let Hitler and the Germans do what they pleased with the Warsaw ghetto, with the death camps? Germany was a democratically elected government—should we have stepped back from the horror of their inhumane treatment of the Poles just because they had a democracy? Does the suffering that the Jewish peoples endured in the 40's give them carte blanche for war crimes now? Why is it different, when the treatment is the same, but only the names have changed?

Evil endures. It wears different masks. The atrocity we stamped out in one generation recurs in the next. It seldom recurs in the same way. Yes, the Jewish peoples suffered massively in WWII. (They weren't the only ones, ask the Romany, ask the Russians, ask the French and the Belgians). Obviously, people who have suffered so much would not repeat the evil that they lived through at another's hands, would they?

And yet, modern science and psychology bears this out. Victims of violence often become perpetrators of the same. Without treatment, violent crimes are perpetuated through the generations, repeated upon new innocents. This is Israel's condition today. Israel was a nation founded by shell-shocked sufferers of PTSD. They didn't get treatment, they went to war again, this time against the indigenous peoples of Palestine, and it continues to this day. Should we let the innocents of Palestine suffer? Why do we let the world's largest ghetto, the largest open air prison, continue to exist? For this is certainly what Gaza is, Warsaw revisited. Why do we let the obviously traumatized Israelis continue to perpetrate violent acts of aggression against children, for Christ's sake! For there are children in Gaza, there are mothers there, and fathers, and all they want is what anyone wants, a chance for life, a chance for family, and ways and means to feed and keep them.

The blockade of Gaza is illegal, it is immoral, it is evil at it's shape-shifting best, all dressed up in fancy words and self-righteous indignation. Just because the Jewish people suffered in the 40's does not give them a right to turn around and give out a 'healthy dose' of the same. It certainly does not give them a right to board a boat in international waters, guns blazing, to kill peaceful peoples, who only were doing what they did for the Jews in WWII, trying to stop the madness, trying to stop the blockade, and to give humanitarian aid to distressed peoples.

What if the world had sat back and let Germany have its way? Think about it. But, the world did not sit back then, and we should not sit back now. Evil still wages war, it has patriotic words, and massive PR machines, and plenty of reasons to justify its actions. But its nature has not changed, and we are still fighting the same battle. However, we can't use the weapons of evil to win the war, or we face becoming what we fight.

The Turkish people who died on that convoy are heroes. As are the rest of the international crew. And the Israeli soldiers who opened fire on peaceful people are still war criminals and evil-doers, pawns or no. We can no longer stand back and let this continue. We didn't let Hitler's Germany get away with its treatment of Warsaw, and we cannot let Israel do the same to Gaza. Keep up the work, keep up the talk, keep trying to break the blockade. Write, talk, act, contact your representatives, make them listen. Vote, vote with your political choice, vote with your collective currency. Don't support the war machine, don't support politicians who stand back and do nothing, don't support the evil that is the Gaza blockade. Don't buy Israeli products until they lift the blockade. These are the peaceful choices we have, we who live too far from the conflict to try to cross the blockade. But we must make this choice, for the sake of the world, and for the sake of our children, everywhere.

In quantum peace.