Kendall Stanley: Intractable situation
How do you bring peace to the Middle East?
As fighting escalated after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas in Israel, support or condemnation were all over the map.
There were the calls for rooting out Hamas from the Gaza Strip after its heinous actions in Israel — and support for the Palestinians who have lived under what some consider apartheid-like conditions in the Gaza Strip. Israel was right in seeking to route Hamas and by bombing Gaza City and other regions in the strip, or they were wrongly and inhumanely bombing that killed many civilians.
There are so many sides to the conflicts in the Mideast that consensus needed to provide peace for all is a goal that remains far, far from happening.
The perennial push for a two-state solution — a place for Palestinians and one for Israelis — leaves out too many parties in the region with views that make a two-state solution unrealistic.
It should be a mark of civilization that civilians should not be part of the equation, should not be seen as mere collateral damages in the line of fire.
With Hamas throwing that out the window and Israel bombing areas where they believe Hamas is hiding out taking civilian housing with it, international condemnation remains ineffective.
A friend over for dinner recently was sharing what he found when he spent about a month in Israel a while back. He made the trip he said so he could see firsthand what was happening in the Holy Land.
As it pertained to the Gaza Strip, he felt Palestinians there would have given anything to get rid of Hamas in their midst. There would be no peace until they were gone.
In that sense they are no different than Israelis, who would welcome the disappearance of Hamas and its counterpart in the West Bank, Hezbollah.
Anti-Jewish sentiment goes back centuries in the Mideast. There has been no peace and harmony for hundreds of years in that part of the world.
As Israel’s biggest backer in the world, the animus aimed toward the Jewish state also heads our way.
The question becomes where do we go from here?
President Biden made it clear to other actors in the region, notably Iran, that interference with Israel and its enemies would not be tolerated. He insisted that Israel has a right to defend itself and to seek to eliminate Hamas from the Mideast.
He also, however, pushed Israel to avoid loss of life of civilians in Gaza.
Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times reported the twists and turns that rile the Mideast.
“No one understands terrorism more viscerally than Maoz Inon: His 78-year-old father and 75-year-old mother were among those massacred by Hamas this month in southern Israel.
“He mourns his parents, and he despairs for old friends who have been kidnapped by Hamas. Yet he also fears that the unbearable losses his family endured are now being used to justify an impending ground invasion in Gaza.
“I don’t stop crying,” he told me in the hostel he runs here in Tel Aviv. “I’m crying for my parents. I’m crying for my friends. I’m crying for those who are kidnapped. I’m crying for the victims on the Palestinian side. And I’m crying for all the victims that are going to suffer.”
“We don’t sleep at night, we don’t eat, we are under emotional trauma,” he said. “We are just broken. But from these traumatized days, we must learn the lessons from history.” And foremost among them, he said, is the need to break the pattern of escalating violence that feeds hatred, creates orphans and self-replicates indefinitely.”
Ah yes, breaking the pattern, a continued cycle of death.
There’s a saying I heard long ago that applies to the Mideast – an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
The quote is generally attributed to Mahatma Gandhi of India, which would match with his philosophy, but it would still require each side to stop poking each other’s eyes out to see the possibilities available to them.
Sadly much blood will be shed before that vision is accomplished.
— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Kendall Stanley: Intractable situation
