October 1st, 2015- Eitam Henkin, his wife, Naama, and their four children were shot at in the West Bank by gunmen, “lightly injuring” the children and killing the parents.
October 3rd, 2015- A Palestinian man “approached” a group of Israelis and began stabbing them, injuring one woman and her child, but stabbing two members to death.
October 13th, 2015- Attackers stormed onto a bus in Jerusalem, one opening fire and the other stabbing people aboard the bus.
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This has become a pattern.
In this day and age it is strikingly easy and almost effortless, if you will, to form an opinion off of a single headline. In fact, it’s even time-efficient to pick one news source based off of a glance during a Facebook newsfeed scroll and move on with your day. But one headline is never the whole story.
The truth is that we are uninformed. We are uninformed because we choose the easy way out. And that’s where the problem gets worse:
The world’s idea of sovereignty is a grey area– all throughout history, countries have broken rules of sovereignty for “moral purposes” or for the good of “humanity” in other countries. Call it diplomacy or call it intrusion, but it happens ALL THE TIME.
But then why, in the past few days, has the support of the rest of the world seemingly failed?
Israel is disputed. The very existence of it challenges the beliefs of many and also nurtures the cultural and physical homebase of Jews everywhere. But controversy or not, Israel is a Jewish state, both culturally and federally. Whether Israel has the right to exist as such has resulted in heart-wrenchingly grotesque attacks on innocent civilians. The freedom of religion in Israel wasn’t meant to result in a loss of humanity all together.
Yesterday, two Arab teenagers, one thirteen and one seventeen, walked the streets of Jerusalem. Normal. A religious jew walked by them in the other direction. Normal. The two boys pulled out knives from their pockets and chased the religious Jew down the street. Still normal?
But this article isn’t catered to single-handedly solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It is very unclear which is more disturbing: the sporadic yet terrifyingly common and unprovoked slaughtering of civilians, or that the world has been silent about all of it. This is no longer just a political issue.
This is a humanist issue.
It is civilians. It’s not governments, or militias, or even armies; it’s human beings, it’s individuals with weapons in hand, looking others in the eye and stealing a life that isn’t theirs to take. This is an issue of INDIVIDUALS stripping away life from other people because of what? Because of sovereignty? Because of detestation?
I’m not asking you, supposedly global citizens, to take a side of Israel-Palestine conflict. I’m asking you, encouraging you to take the side of humanity, and take the side of the human spirit. Let’s be informed, and don’t stand idly by.
Take a stand with me.