No Salvation for Humanity

It may seem trivial to blog about the current Middle East situation. What? More words? Hasn't everyone and anyone already written, blogged, videotaped, posted, analyzed, spoken on TV and radio? Isn't it a permanent ongoing race to the latest dead bodies's and injured's count? Doesn't it feel as if we were hyenas eating up the corpses of what the media have already chewed up? Aren't we replaying this ugly war in the comfort of our houses, hypnotized by the 24 hour news and the nightscope images on our big screen TVs, as if it were a mere video game? As if it were a game... It seems so far away.

Are we the ultimate voyeurs? You would have thought that after all the decades since World War 2 and the increasing communication means we would have had enough pictures of genocide, violence, war, enough to demonstrate and call for peace instead of conjuring up new blood. Nor the picture of the little Vietnamese girl burnt by napalm, nor the Killing Fields of Cambodia, nor the photography of the famished little African boy barely alive and about to eaten by the fuzzy vulture in the distance, nor the American soldier lynched in Somalia, nor the thousands dead in a couple of hours on 9/11, nor the discovery of mass graves, rapes and murders in the name of "ethnic cleansing" or political ideology on all the continents, nothing will be of use to humanity.

No images are strong enough to make nations stop and think that children's lives are too precious to be sacrificed on the altar of God, State or citizenship. Where is the new John Lennon who would be singing "Imagine...no religion, no country, nothing to kill or die for"?
Is History deemed to repeat itself senselessly?

We are all Cains, vindinctive and jealous, envious and murderous. Are we even worthy of some form of redemption?

These last weeks have borne a toll on my sanity. All the explanations provided right and left: the pro-Israeli prejudice in the main stream American press, the pro-Palestinian prejudice in the main stream European press, the omissions of both media with regards to pro-peace demonstrators (Israeli against what is happening in Gaza and Palestinians against another war with Israel), the blogs putting oil on this information fire, the comments on the blogs exuding hatred, calling to murder of one or the other, the one mountain of now fallacious religious, racist, historical, and political grounds on which one side bases its claims and the other mountain of the reversely qualified grounds of the other side.... The synagogue attacked in my hometown in France, the shouts of "Death to the Jews" in the streets of Paris, sung by Muslims and Christians alike, or should I say by Muslims and secular French alike? The calls for eradication of the State of Israel by some and of the Palestinians by others, the anger, the hatred...

There is NO salvation for humanity!

The hypocritical or fearful silence of those, in the Middle East, from Egypt, to Saoudi Arabia, to Lebanon, and the PA themselves, who wish for Hamas to be gone, to disappear, but who would never say it aloud, who wish for peace with Israel and look back with nostalgia at the year 2000 before the Second Intifada as a "golden age" of Israeli-Palestinian relationships, who wish that the unilateral negotiations between Syria and Israel had borne fruit in order to isolate Iran, their enemy within Islam, who lip-condemn the attacks for fear of enraging their own population, for fear of losing their own power...

Obama's election and a potential change in the American Foreign Policy as the possible reason for this attack on Gaza? Would the Israeli have measured the risk of "change" in the White House and decided to go ahead while Bush was still in power? Do they think that Rahm Emanuel is not hawkish enough, will not lobbby enough in their favor?

The stubborn attitude of the Israeli government who puts at risk not only the existence of the Hebrew State, but of all the Jewish populations scattered around the world, who may now fall victims of terrorist's attacks, of antisemitic acts, who puts the world at risk of a World War if Iran decides that it is time to enter the game.

Both sides playing at being more democratic than the other, more deserving than the other, when none is one or the other...

Indeed, there is NO salvation for humanity!