The Land of Tears

I’m just a journalist writing a weekly column for a local newspaper. Writers more talented, more knowledgeable and much more eloquent than I could ever hope to be, have attempted to understand the Middle East conflict and failed. I don’t pretend to have any answers to the current bloodshed affecting the area. But how can I not ask the questions? “They just want us to disappear from the face of the earth,” says a Jewish friend of mine, who happened to be on her way back from a vacation in Israel, when the first Hamas rockets started hitting the Gaza Strip. She speaks with the determined --yet weary-- resolution of someone who has already decided that she’s moving back there.

I wonder how she can even contemplate leaving the peace and safety of Canada, to make a life in a country where shelters and sirens are a way of life. “By law, you must have a bomb shelter in your home,” she explains to me. I hear “bomb shelter”; all she hears is “home”.

I have shared in the pain of my displaced Palestinian friends over the years and listened to their stories and the longing in their voices. Dust, death and destruction are all I see from Gaza these days. I watch heart wrenching images of parents and aid workers digging dead children out of the rubble and I think: "Why does it matter who started what, when? Why should it matter, when innocents on both sides are dying every single day? Just find a solution already!

But, of course, it's not that simple. Will we ever see peace in the Middle East emerge in our lifetime? Will calmer heads and compassionate hearts ever prevail? Hate can be easy. Love, leniency and understanding require so much work.

Hamas, the self-proclaimed “Fighting Spirit”, guided by religious fervour and political self-interest, has hijacked the country. Are they a ruthless terrorist group, whose ends justify the means and willingly sacrifices its own citizens to further its own cause, or are they a political party, building schools and clinics for grateful Palestinians? Perception... it’s a fickle thing. It can quickly transform one person’s terrorist to another person’s freedom fighter.

How does one understand and make sense of the undisputable fact that hatred and injustices (real, perceived or otherwise) have a way of living and surviving from one generation to the next? How does one comprehend how fear, intolerance, resentment and grievances can spread like cancer and consume a person; a nation? Hatred is a river that runs deep. As a Greek, who lived in the war-torn Balkans for ten years, ask me how the average Greek feels about the average Turk.

Try negotiating co-existence in a small, overly disputed part of the world among people who have strong identities, strong beliefs, strong gripes, long histories and long memories, conflicting interests and agendas. How does one find a solution to appease and satisfy everyone vying for a region that is so sacred to three religions? I wish I knew… “It is such a secret place, the land of tears” says Antoine Saint-Exupery, in “The Little Prince”. Watching the bloodshed and the unrelenting pain in people’s faces, on both sides, play out in the daily news, I think to myself: “It is not such a secret place, after all.” How sad that this “land of tears”, is a land that everyone --irrelevant of religion, ethnicity and borders-- can easily claim as their own; a place everyone in this region, unfortunately, now has equal access to.