Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

It has been hard watching what is going on is Israel.

Thousands of people dying, housing for hundreds of thousands destroyed, and aid being denied to people who have no other source of food are not pretty pictures.

This problem was exacerbated by HAMAS, a terrorist group within Gaza, which attacked Israelis on October 7, 2023 and killed many without any warning.

Israel was within its rights to respond and deal with this attack.

And yet the huge numbers of non-HAMAS Palestinians who have died in the fighting has not been ignored by other nations of the world or Palestinians elsewhere.

Guerrilla warfare is a nasty way to fight a war. Guerrilla fighters mix themselves in with civilians so that none of them die without taking a lot of civilians with them. In Gaza there was no way to seek to kill members of HAMAS without going through civilians. Tunnels where HAMAS hid were under places where civilians lived, worked or sought medical care.

The theory is that nobody would want to kill so many civilians to kill a much smaller number of HAMAS.         So normal methods of warfare such as bombing, artillery, missiles and rockets directed to kill members of HAMAS took a greater toll in Palestinians. To those of us outside watching pictures and film of the devastation what we saw was horrible.

It seemed to those of us on the outside that Israel didn’t give a bit of concern to the fate of the Palestinians as long as every bomb, rocket, missile and artillery shell took the life of at least one member of HAMAS. And it also seemed that if no member of HAMAS was eliminated it didn’t seem to bother Israel one bit.

The only problem with what is happening now is that it will embitter the Palestinians even more against the Israelis. And that means that peace in Israel will be elusive indeed.

If the issue were not complicated enough, other Middle Eastern nations take sides funneling weapons to one side or the other or actually even launching their own rockets and missiles.

Much has been talked about over the years to calm down the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Most mentioned is the two-state solution. Give the Palestinians some land that is their own, work with them as neighbors and allow them to govern themselves.

But there is so little trust left between the two that just about any solution will take generations to fully be enacted. As long as people remember the horror of the bombs, rockets, artillery shells and missiles there will be a lack of complete trust on both sides.       

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, had an excellent piece about thinking through the moral tangle in Gaza in the June 9 Star Tribune.

One paragraph reads: “All lives have equal value, and all children must be presumed to be innocent. So while there is no moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, there is a moral equivalence between Israeli civilians and Palestinian civilians. If you champion the human rights of only Israelis or only Palestinians you don’t actually care about human rights.”

And another reads: “We can identify as pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, but priority should go to being anti-massacre, anti-starvation and anti-rape.”

And one more reads: “Campus protesters would do more good raising money for suffering Palestinians rather than using it to buy tents for themselves.”

It’s a complex issue and Kristof concludes that both Israel and the Palestinians probably need new leadership to work on what will be a lengthy path to a peaceful co-existence.