Weeping for Jerusalem

The Palestine/ Israeli conflict is in the headlines again. How anybody on either side can look at it and not be moved I don't know. How Israel thinks attacking targets where there's a high risk of killing or wounding civillians is going to stop Palestinian rocket attacks is also beyond me. But I don't think they do, really. A friend writes here about how the conflict serves to distract the Israeli public and politicians from internal problems. Forget the original cause, a dispute over land ownership, now it seems just an excuse to hate each other. The hate won't stop unless the land issues are sorted, in some measure, but with neither side willing to give ground (literally) it seems the violence will just go on and on. Neither side's international friends will let them be totally destroyed by the other.

Are the measures each side has taken justified? They say they are, of course. But I find Israel's treatment of the Palestinians- hemming them in with walls and checkpoints, cutting families and friends off from one another, preventing people going to work or basic humanitarian supplies from reaching Hamas-held territory pretty hard to defend, even before the latest round of violence. Of course, firing rockets that hit civillians isn't justified either. But to retaliate, as Israel has done, by targeting schools and refugee camps where they know there will be a high chance of hitting civillians...I find it hard to see how it's justifiable.

I don't know the solution. I don't even know if there is one. It would be a good start if those on both sides could stop seeing each other as "the enemy" and treat each other as human beings, it would be good if both sides realised the other does have a claim to the land as well as they do, and that a two-state solution is actually possible, it would be good if certain elements didn't try to blame everything on anti-semitism and the holocaust. Is the irrational hatred of and discrimination against Jews is any worse than the irrational hatred of and discrimination against Arabs Israelis or Palestinians?

When Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to be crucified he stopped and looked at the city, saying "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you." (Luke 19 v41).

The reference is usually interpreted as referring to the destruction caused by the Romans in about 70AD, but you can sense Jesus' frustration- the Jews would not see what they were doing, how they were storing up trouble for themselves. Jesus wept over the city then. I imagine he still weeps over what the Israelis and Palestinians are doing to each other. Perhaps if only the leaders of the two groups would see, and weep too, there might be some hope of an end to all this.