The Diaspora: Reader comments on Israel, Palestine and the war
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To the Editor:
Children often have interesting thoughts about “current events. One of our grandchildren, at age 3 was aware of President George W. Bush and spoke of him as George Washington Bush. I am not sure that I was aware of George Washington at that age, but at age 10 or 11, I was very aware of the liberation of emaciated, hollow-eyed people from concentration camps in Europe. I was sad and horrified and understood that a dictator could to sow hatred among peoples in order to control them so they could commit atrocities.
It was a surprise to me at that same age, that the creation of the modern Israel involved confining the Palestinians, the people who had lived in Palestine, as it had been known, before and since the Diaspora of Israelites at least about the 1st century CE.
By the first century, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, “an estimated 5,000,000 Jews lived outside Palestine, about four-fifths of them within the Roman Empire, but they looked to Palestine as the centre of their religious and cultural life. Diaspora Jews thus far outnumbered the Jews in Palestine even before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.”
I naïvely thought as a child, that surely, people who had undergone such suffering, would not arbitrarily, essentially pen up the people who had lived in Palestine for two millennia without offering to find a way for the Palestinians and Israelis to share the land. Perhaps, I thought, the Israelis will offer to buy land to settle in Palestine.
Later, I learned that people who have been badly treated may tend to treat other people badly, as some Irish who emigrated to this country enslaved many people from Africa. The English had conquered Ireland during the time of Queen Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell, outlawing the Irish language and in the 1850s making sure the Irish were not able to obtain potatoes to eat.
There is good reason to treat people kindly in every day life, if we want a world without cruelty.
Having good friends who are both Jewish and Palestinian, it is heart-breaking to see cruelty by Hamas break out at this time. It almost seems that they may have watched what Russia has done in Ukraine and decided to try the inhuman Russian approach of killing civilians and concertgoers and whoever they choose.
Virginia M. Jones
Oak Ridge
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Observations on The Diaspora, Israel and Palestine
