Understanding the Middle East part 11 - Innocent blood

On May 28th, 2002, I was driving back from work. I planned to go through the supermarket on my way home. I was about 5 minutes drive from there when my wife called and asked me if I am OK. She sounded very worried. It was the time of the second Intifada when terror attacks occurred almost daily in Israel. My wife told me that there was one just now in the small shopping center in our neighborhood, the place I was about to go to. A baby and his grandmother were killed that afternoon. The suicide bomber walked right to the table they were sitting at, near the small café in the shopping center, and detonated himself. I couldn't help but thinking exactly what he and his operators wanted me to think, “It could have been me. It could have been my wife and my children”.

Living in a region, where war and terror are a constant part of life, is not easy. We are rationalizing creatures, and in order to survive, we must make sense of what we experience. It is not fair to blame people who live in these conditions for becoming suspicious and hateful. But if we want things to ever change, we must try not to adopt the view that the violence in the region is driven merely by blind hate.

We must make all efforts to avoid this view because it is not true. Violence in the Middle East is the result of the special conditions in the region and of the disrespect of local and foreign power players towards them. Weak leaderships use the “they just hate us” rhetorics as an excuse for doing nothing. Power hungry, selfish opportunists, build on it to create easy gains for themselves, but in the long run it just make everybody loose.

It takes a leap of faith to open your eyes and see what is really going on. To learn to appreciate the beauty of the complex life in the Middle East. Unfortunately, faith is the first victim of fear and hate, and what dull politicians describe as a clash of faiths, is in fact a clash of disbelieves.

Faithful people are not afraid to live and cooperate with people who have different beliefs of their own. They have enough self confidence to openly exchange thoughts and ideas with others and even let others influence their beliefs every once in awhile. There may be occasional disputes and quarrels, but if things go completely out of control then something is broken. Hate is not normal and should not be accepted as something we can't do anything about.

We are all human. We make mistakes, we do wrong while believing that we are doing the right thing, we have false convictions and we can't help but sometimes hold grudge against others, fear or hate them. But to know that something is not true and still say it, to know that a did is harmful and still do it, that's evil. Evil must not be tolerated. It must be fought against without hesitation. Yet no amount of darkness can win over darkness and no lie is better than other lie. Only light can overcome darkness and only the truth can win over lies.

It is hard to imagine how anyone can be so much full of hate, that he will be able to go to a table where a baby and his grandmother are, and detonate himself. It seems to us as a savage, even inhumane act. But if we will take apart the story of the modern conflicts in the Middle East, we will find that the role of, so called civilized people is much greater in it than that of savages. We are going to start doing that in the next chapter, and then you will see how it's completely different than just blind hate.