Kauneonga Lake

To the editor:

As I write, there are still rockets going off above Tel Aviv,  as my children and grandchildren report to me (frantic on Whatsap) that sirens are sounding and there are decisions about whether or not to head for shelter. My young granddaughter in Kvar Saba, who just completed her army service in Israel, reports that she is reading Dara Horn’s book, “People Love Dead Jews,” and she asked me, “Why do people hate us?” 

“It’s not just us,” I tell her. A six year old American child was just stabbed 27 times because he was a Muslim. “People can get filled with hate. And they invent a target. The Jews are just a good one.  But there are others.”

One of my grandsons in Israel is just about to begin his army service and can’t wait to start. I am proud of him because as a child of a holocaust family, I chanted NEVER AGAIN enough times to plant the phrase in my DNA. And I am sitting here in Sullivan County praying that this is all a nightmare.  Not again, I think.  The IDF was Israel’s “Never Again.” But I don’t want my grandchildren in any army, and I am afraid of these “enemies” of Israel who are also just young boys who have been driven to such hatred that they are no longer human. They are able to kill babies and rape innocent girls. Do I want this for my progeny? Do I want to have them hate and murder just to survive in a country surrounded by dangerous beasts.   

 I am one of those dual citizen Israeli/Americans who has been through war in Israel, who has been to Yad Veshem in Jerusalem where dead Jews and the holocaust is immortalized, who has seen brutality and butchery and prayed for peace.

So many of the innocents butchered by the marauders were peaceniks. The music festival was for peace, not war. The settlements in the south were all ProPalestinian. 

I appreciated Barry Lewis’s column in The Democrat “Choose Peace not Pogroms.” It was comforting to have him stand in solidarity with Israel because he is Jewish.

But if prayers don’t bring peace, and wars don’t bring peace, and pundits and columnists can’t change our world. . . then what?  “Give Peace a chance?”  Yeah!  Pleaded John Lennon, gunned down by some maniac in cold blood at his own doorstep. Give Peace a chance. But how?