Editorials

Ash Wednesday was this week, the traditional opening day of six weeks of reflection for Christians. And today an old friend e-mailed a link to a website, rememberthesechildren.org, which lists the names and ages of children killed in the ongoing dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The numbers alone are sobering. Since the first of this year, one Israeli child and 16 Palestinian children have died. Since September of 2000, dead Palestinian children number 671, with 118 Israeli kids dead. We’ll get letters, undoubtedly, pointing out that more children have probably died in Darfur, and in the tsunamis, and the letter writers will perhaps therefore try to minimize the impact of the deaths of the children in Israel. Or perhaps they will try to blame the adults who are associated with the dead children, and accuse them of negligence or of fomenting the strife which produced the deaths, or even of sending children on suicide missions. Such partisan argument misses the point: As long as the rest of us in the rest of the world acquiesce in the death of any child anywhere, we are participating in some way in causing these deaths. And in the words of John Dunne, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”  

A well-meaning Berkeleyan has been working on arranging a meeting for us with religious leaders from his community to discuss the Israel-Palestine situation and what they think about how the Daily Planet has presented it on our opinion pages. He’s pretty sure in his own mind that we’re wrong, but he wants us all to discuss it. We have agreed to meet them at any time and place of their choosing, because we think that what’s going on, particularly as innocent children (and adults) are affected, is something that all of us should be concerned about. We’d like to have a similar meeting with religious leaders whose co-religionists are “on the other side” in the controversy. All of us, whether religious or not, need to re-dedicate ourselves to doing all we can to bring an end to the killing.  

One way of doing this is to talk to one another. Karl Linn, a European Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust by going to Palestine in the 1930s, participated in Jewish-Palestinian dialogue groups in recent years before his death. As far as we’ve heard, these talks haven’t succeeded in ending the strife, but they are a beginning. The best way to honor Karl’s memory will be for community members who care about what’s going on in the Middle East to keep trying, even though it can often be painful, to talk to one another about our differences, and also, especially, about what we agree on. We can’t afford not to.  

—Becky O’Malleyi