By: Gabor Maté Published on Tue Jul 22 2014

As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: “How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?” It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does.

In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach.

In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, “we do.” Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?

There is no understanding Gaza out of context — Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians — and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.

The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability.

Israel wants peace? Perhaps, but as the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has pointed out, it does not want a just peace. Occupation and creeping annexation, an inhumane blockade, the destruction of olive groves, the arbitrary imprisonment of thousands, torture, daily humiliation of civilians, house demolitions: these are not policies compatible with any desire for a just peace. In Tel Aviv Gideon Levy now moves around with a bodyguard, the price of speaking the truth.

I have visited Gaza and the West Bank. I saw multi-generational Palestinian families weeping in hospitals around the bedsides of their wounded, at the graves of their dead. These are not people who do not care about life. They are like us — Canadians, Jews, like anyone: they celebrate life, family, work, education, food, peace, joy. And they are capable of hatred, they can harbour vengeance in the hearts, just like we can.

One could debate details, historical and current, back and forth. Since my days as a young Zionist and, later, as a member of Jews for a Just Peace, I have often done so. I used to believe that if people knew the facts, they would open to the truth. That, too, was naïve. This issue is far too charged with emotion. As the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, the accumulated mutual pain in the Middle East is so acute, “a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless cycle of perpetration and retribution.” “People’s leaders have been misleaders, so they that are led have been confused,” in the words of the prophet Jeremiah. The voices of justice and sanity are not heeded. Netanyahu has his reasons. Harper and Obama have theirs.

And what shall we do, we ordinary people? I pray we can listen to our hearts. My heart tells me that “never again” is not a tribal slogan, that the murder of my grandparents in Auschwitz does not justify the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, that justice, truth, peace are not tribal prerogatives. That Israel’s “right to defend itself,” unarguable in principle, does not validate mass killing.

A few days ago I met with one of my dearest friends, a comrade from Zionist days and now professor emeritus at an Israeli university. We spoke of everything but the daily savagery depicted on our TV screens. We both feared the rancour that would arise.

But, I want to say to my friend, can we not be sad together at what that beautiful old dream of Jewish redemption has come to? Can we not grieve the death of innocents? I am sad these days. Can we not at least mourn together?

Gabor Maté, M.D., is a Vancouver-based author and speaker, and the following commentary provides a historical perspective by Mat Wilson, author of Preserving their Legacy.

World War I brought us World War II. World War II brought us the Cold War and the delusion that we won it.

The New Cold War is threatening to lead to Total War.

Needless to say, those who think that it is time to win the New Cold War are the driving force which will invariably lead to mutual, self-destruction.

It is not difficult to understand the fact that the world is on the brink of total annihilation. The miscalculations that will bring that about are quite clear.

Remember when Obama threatened to bomb Syria back to the stone age? Remember the blame game that preceded that? The case against Syria, it appeared, was being fraudulently manufactured and the effort to turn that Cold War into a Hot One was temporarily halted but the conflict persists.

Moreover, the stakes are even higher now because the Cold War conflagration has gone from proxy to direct confrontation. It does not take a genius to figure out the fact that as long as China, Russia and the United States act like enemies, we are all on the brink of total annihilation.

Does anybody not get that?

The threat of nuclear war has never been greater and the complacency in that regard has never been higher, so when it starts, all sides will self-righteously blame the other, and then, WHO CARES WHO STARTED WHAT?

Wake up world. Get off the blame game wagon and end the Cold War, once and for all because the alternative is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.

Obama wants peace but he is merely a puppet. He even thinks he killed Osama Bin Laden. The fact is, Bin Laden died even before Sadam Hussein did but the US needed a pretext to destroy Iraq and they therefore kept his death a secret -and threw his body into the sea when nobody was looking LOL. (WHY ARE WE BEING SO DAMNED STUPID?)

There is no doubt that Obama killed Bin Laden's son and to those zealots who plot wars and ULTIMATELY control the world -"what difference does it make"? -as she shrugs her shoulders.

Will Obama wake up before it's too late or will he pull the nuclear trigger?

Been there, done that. Only real question: WILL HISTORY REPEAT?


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