Finding Unity

Connecting the pieces on the path to peace

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when faced with the headline, “Israel cuts off electricity in Gaza.” Your response may be influenced by many factors: alliances (religious, cultural, national), your knowledge of the history of Palestine and Israel, your awareness of the difference between Judaism and Zionism, your own lifestyle (i.e. what happens in your life when you lose electricity), what source you depend on for news, and your ability to think critically.

I ask this question not to judge people by their responses, but to remind myself (and to gently suggest that you ask yourself) why we mentally arrive at our opinions, and whether we have put any real thought into what we accept as the “truth” of the situation.

So, back to the cutting off the electricity in Gaza. For most of us living in the US, the lack of electricity is mostly an annoyance, and it is in most cases short-lived. Food in the freezer is lost, we can’t charge our tablets and smart phones (unless we have a charger that works through the car’s battery), we are temporarily too hot (no A/C) or too cold (no heat), we have to run to the store for ice to keep medication such as insulin safe . . . Basically, though, most of us will live through an electrical outage—it’s not a situation of life and death.

Let’s imagine ourselves in Gaza without electricity. A mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a grandparent, a child. You are one of over a million of Palestinians trapped in an area that is about 25 miles long by 5 miles wide. “At 139 square miles, the Gaza Strip is approximately equal in size to the city of Philadelphia. But the Gaza Strip has about one-third more people than Philadelphia, and the densest part of Gaza — the municipality that contains part of Gaza City — has roughly 10 times as many people as Philadelphia’s most populous ZIP code.”

Nearly 600 of your neighborhood’s children have been killed in the past few days. You are deafened by the ammunition blasts, maybe suffering from burns and deep, bleeding wounds. There is no room at the hospital, and there are no more medicines to treat the wounded that are already there.

You desperately want to protect your family, a family that Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls “human animals” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls “human beasts.”

There is no place to seek safety and comfort. The drinking water is contaminated. Whole blocks of housing have disappeared into rubble, along with the bathrooms and systems for treatment of waste.

You are frightened, hungry, and thirsty. You cannot wash your body or your clothing. You sit surrounded by contamination. You are unable to contact anyone because your phone’s battery is dead. You try to close your ears to the wails of the dying. And you sit in darkness, awaiting the next munition to explode overhead. A munition that may explode in a plume of white phosphorus, causing excruciating burns that cannot be salved.

Now, come back to your own life.

Can you disconnect for a moment from the news stories telling you whose side you're supposed to be on, and just try to realize that innocent people are dying on both sides, and that it’s horrible. Would you join in calls for peace rather than blindly allowing your tax dollars to go towards the weaponry that inflicts such terror and suffering on civilians — people who, just like you, want to have a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs?

Can you love your neighbor as yourself? All humanity is our neighbor. You don’t have to understand all the background (although that helps), you just have to love your fellow human beings enough to realize that they are not the enemy. The enemy is the system that encourages endless wars.

We need to realize that we really don’t have the whole story, but instead are receiving biased viewpoints filtered through mostly regulated sources. The independent journalists are finding it more and more difficult to report from Gaza, as electronic communication is cut off when the electricity to charge batteries is gone, and even the big news agencies’ coverage is diminished, as reporters from Reuters, AFP, and Al Jazeera have been killed by artillery fire in southern Lebanon.

Think outside the box. How does this endless violence make any sense? Is there a better way? Would it be wise to do a little more digging, to educate yourself, before jumping in to take sides in battles?

We got rid of “the draft” here in the US in the 1970’s, yet history shows that military conscription has returned for six major wars that the US has been involved in. If you accept the mandatory conscription that occurs in other countries ( i.e. Israel, Ukraine), are you ready to accept it in your nation? If you support war, are you ready to offer your own life, or that of your child?

When we ask ourselves these questions, we realize our shared humanity. We find ourselves all pieces of the same puzzle. Because who is the “other?” The “other” is not a person. The “other” is a system. A system that promotes greed and domination.

Violence is not the answer. We keep on fighting because we are too afraid to unite with our fellow human beings. We end up destroying our global neighbors, and our earthly environment, pursuing endless battles that will never result in gain for the majority of us, but rather keep the managers of empire in more wealth than anyone could possibly spend in a lifetime.

Maybe you don’t want to step outside your comfort zone by even thinking about such things — you don’t need the stress. Well, neither do the Palestinians or the Ukrainians, or the peoples of all the other nations who are living and dying under constant wars.

Educate yourself. Think for yourself. The second requires the first. Stop fighting the battles of the modern emperors.

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