Reflections on Gaza

I've been missing in action for a few days because I've gotten sucked into the world of Facebook. Not sure what to make of this...

Looking out at the world, the news from Gaza is heartbreaking. Here are some wise words from my friend Alan Senauke, of the Clear View Project:

Reflections on Gaza and the Ritual of Mutual Destruction
Hozan Alan Senauke — 1.2.09

Gaza is burning. The violence must end before anything else can happen. We can all think nice thoughts about right and wrong, who acted first, who acted worst. We can argue about politics — national, international, geopolitical, corporate. Whatever intellectual thread my mind pulls at quickly comes to a hopeless tangle. The reality of fear, death, and destruction is beyond all this. A father weeps for his five daughters who died in their sleep, “collateral damage” in the heart of Gaza City. A daughter cries out for her mother, lost in a Hamas rocket attack on the town of Ashdod. Multiply that scene by a thousand. See yourself right in the midst of it. In this latest round, to date, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli attacks. The Israeli government counts 19 fatalities from Hamas rockets since 2002.

There is, of course, something pointless to the algebra of comparative suffering. But Israel’s attack on Gaza is like shooting fish in a barrel. The body count and vast disproportion of weapons, technology, and killing make me ashamed to acknowledge that my government supplies so much of Israel’s weaponry, and ashamed to be a Jew, even as I fear for the future of the people I was born to. Present day Israel seems to have forgotten the words God spoke through the old prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 12:19,20):

"…and say unto the people of the land, thus saith the Lord God of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and of the land of Israel; they shall eat their bread with carefulness, and drink their water with astonishment, that her land shall be desolate from all that is therein, because of the violence of all them that dwell therein. And the cities that are inhabited shall be laid to waste, and the land shall be desolate, and ye shall know that I am the Lord."

There's more -- you can read the whole essay (and suggestions for action) here: http://clearviewproject.org/newsalerts.html