4) Slight of Coin…Slight of Name

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Israel impressed me.

I was impressed by their achievements.

The green grass growing where once there was nothing but dry barren land.
The orchards brimming with apples in an otherwise treeless landscape.
The brilliance of the hose down in the shiny kitchen when at the end of each day everything was hosed down and everything was left clean and shiny ready for the next.

I was impressed by the packing sheds, its conveyer belts, the sorting and grading of apples, and the way even bad apples were not wasted.

I was impressed by the way these people were using ingenuity to build a strong working system that met their needs.

I was foolishly impressed.

It is only now that I can see the worm at the heart of the apple when I revisit my memories of those days and see now what the nation has become.

Could I have run from a laundry about to be bombed leaving workers who did not understand the language behind?

No.

I would have somehow got them running too.

Could I have worked alongside someone for eight hours a day and not bothered to make eye contact or to even smile at them, or not bother to invite or even inform them about a building where there was chatter and music?

No. Of course not. I would have taken them there, and probably on the first day of my acquaintance.

The Arab family took me into their home when I was lost. They helped me to find my way back. Not one Israeli family ever invited me into their home when I was working amongst them.

I was shocked by the ferocity of Israel’s response to the attacks. The three rockets fired at the Kibbutz missed. They seemed to think it was because their skills with rockets were useless and that they could not aim a rocket properly. Perhaps it was so. But I saw the holes left by the rockets well to the south of the kibbutz. They looked to me rather like a warning shot. A shot that is fired deliberately over the bow of a ship and intended to miss. I think they missed because they meant to miss. That they knew there were children who might be killed and I like to imagine, and I hope that it is true, that whoever fired their missiles had enough humanity in their soul to ensure that the missiles missed. That the missiles missed because they thought of their own children and what it would be like to lose them. That they were just throwing stones.

The kibbutz covered a vast area of land with a huge building at its heart. It was not a target that it would be easy to miss. It was rather like a bull’s eye that took up the whole of the board.

And yet miss they did.

But Israel’s fixed principle of firing back with ten times the power and the aggression caused indiscriminate deaths in Lebanon hours after the spectacular miss.

I realised then that Israel was a nervous, unsure, adolescent country. That it was paranoid and jumpy.

That Israel was like a flea bitten dog.

I see from the way they are killing in indiscriminately in Gaza that Israel is still a flea bitten dog. Maddened and crazed and governed by people who still think might and power is the only way to stop the irritation.

They are wrong.

Scratching at fleas does not solve the problem.

However, since the Palestinians are not fleas, and the Israelis are not dogs and that they are instead people with shared common ancestry and shared common grief there can be an end to all this.

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