Letter to the Editor
With the less than successful Lebanese war coming to a close it may be time for the people of Israel to come up with a long term better plan to establish a new relationship with the world community. Israel has been at war with other religions for thousands of years. I ask the question, how many more thousands of years does the war have to continue until Israel figures out how to get along with the rest of the world? Or, perhaps it's time for Israel to rethink it's role in the world now and spare generations of war?
Israel needs to stop dehumanizing Arabs and start seeing them as people. They are not "Hezbollah" who are all "Terrorists" who need to be exterminated as vermin. They are people like you and me who have children, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, and a community of people who they care about. They are good people who are trying to do the right thing as bast they know how. Seeing the enemy as people is the first step towards peace.
Here in San Francisco California we have Jews and Muslims but we don't kill each other here. We are a community that includes all people and here Jews and Muslims live together and work together and we march together to Anwar Sedat protest the US invasion of Iraq. What is different here is that Jews and Muslims respect each other and we speak the vocabulary of peace, not the vocabulary of war.
So if we can do it then Israel can do it. In 1979 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat put aside put aside his hatred defying the Islamic community to make peace with Israel and now Egyptians and Israelis no longer kill each other. Sadat put aside the vocabulary of war in favor of the vocabulary of peace and it worked. It is time for Israel to look to the future and put aside the past and decide if it wants to embrace reality and be a peaceful member of the world community.
Posted by marc at August 15, 2006 09:09 AM