Humanity and Peace

Today my beloved grandmother would be 124 years old. I would not be here if she hadn’t saved my life twice. I blipped tributes to her in 2016 and 2020, and every day of my life I am grateful for her.

I woke this morning to a kind and respectful invitation to speak on a live broadcast later this month, in “a discussion about humanity and peace and ways we can turn toward those concepts instead of war” in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In honor of the love my grandmother showed me, I post here part of my response to that invitation:

I have never been to Israel nor to Palestine; I don't speak the language of either place. I am a person of non-Jewish European descent living in ease and privilege in the country that provided the bombs and high-tech weapons that destroyed Gaza. What can I say to anyone about humanity and peace?

The material culture of the people of Gaza has been destroyed--libraries, schools, mosques and churches, homes, hospitals, olive groves, farms, animals. Precious objects like photos and rings, a grandmother’s teacups, pressed flowers and love letters, embroideries and musical instruments passed down for generations, destroyed. None of this can be restored. What is “peace” after these losses? 

Lives cannot be restored. Seven-hundred-year-old libraries reduced to dust cannot be restored. What is peace to children whose eyes have been pierced by shrapnel, whose limbs have been torn off, whose parents and siblings have been killed, who are starving, whose trauma is unimaginable, unspeakable? I cannot speak. I can only listen and grieve.

Sue joined me for lunch and we drove up into the forest to walk for a while together in silence.