These are the words of broken hearted Jewish people:
Remember O Lord against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall.,
How they said “Tear it down. Tear it down.
Down to its foundations.”
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us.
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against rocks.
These horrendous, brutal, anguished words came from people who could no longer find acceptable words to describe what had befallen them at the hands of a more powerful enemy. The bitter irony of the events in Gaza is that the very people from whose national suffering and shattering such words of imprecation came, are engaged in actions which create precisely the same future-looking rage, and hunger for vengeance, that make these words so chillingly potent.
So in answer to Mr Netanyahu’s speech about preparing for a protracted operation (for which read more killing of innocent civilians), I remind him of the words of the Jewish people, his people, against Edomites and that a simple word change makes the same overwhelming moral case:
How he said, “Tear it down. Tear it down. Down to its foundations.”
And the response of a broken people, brutalised by overwhelming military force, “O Israel, you devastator!”
The Israeli military rhetoric behind the Gaza assaults will inevitably mean those last verses from a Jewish Psalm, are now being said by Palestinian mothers, fathers and children. They have seen their children and parents dashed to pieces by merciless unremitting salvos of military ordnance, sold and manufactured in the UK and US. Overwhelming grief left unassuaged, and violence unleashed with assumed impunity, normalise the mind-set of the merciless. That is what I detected in Mr Netanyahu’s speech last night. Not political obstinacy, though that too; not justified anger and grievance, though that is also granted. But a merciless dismissal of intolerable suffering of those who have no recourse, or defence. Mercilessness is a corrosive mindset, and a contagious and lethal virus. And a world that stands by and sees it take hold, and says nothing and does nothing effectively to end the carnage, shares the guilt and responsibility for the spread of toxins into a bleak future.
These tank shells are dragon's teeth; they are also merchandise traded around the world as if they were as ordinary and necessary as daily bread.
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