Middle East Crisis – The Other and the Brother
Yesterday I read in the German technology newsticker heise online an article about The War in Lebanon and the Infrastructure of Israel, how deeply the war is wounding the people on both sides of the frontline. There were quotes from an Israeli woman in Haifa writing since years about the situation, who gave a statement which touched me:
“My personal opinion is that all of us here are victims: Jews, muslims, druzes, Christians, Samaritans, Circassians, Haha’i, Lebanese, Syrians, Israelis, Egyptians, Jordans, Bedouins, victims of despots, tyrans, terrorists of an area with a mentality abhorring ‘the others’, educating generation after generation to hate and insult ‘the others’, teaching that ‘the others’ cause all calamities, treating women heardly better than objects and proudly and publicly slaughters deviating mothers, daughters and sisters. Wars, hate and bloodshed will continue here until the end of the days. Peace is a western concept, unknown in the 5000 years old history of this reagion. This is the reality of the Middle East. Either you accept it and come to an arrangement with it or you emigrate.”
After one day of publication of the article there were over 1100 comments to it -emotions are going high about the doggedness of the war parties. One cited Mahatma Gandhi saying: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Learning to see in the other the brother – (br)other – is a deeply spiritual challenge, and only when we learn to focus on the soul, we can overcome the separativeness of “mine” and “the other” – of individuals, groups or nations.
