I have been working on a piece about identity and the impermanence that conditions all our lives. And yet, and yet, the destructive impermanence visited, most recently, first by Hamas in Israel and now visited, in spades, by Israel on Gaza, stays in my mind.
The photos below are drawn from a truly excellent and lengthy piece by +972, an Israeli-Palestinian joint press service. They speak louder than all the words I can write.
Hamas struck civilians murderously. Israel targets civilians with precision. The sadness, violence, and tragedy spread in all directions. The voices for peace are lost, drowned in this violence. Howling in the wind, like Lear in the storm:
Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world.
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ungrateful man.
——
Is there any hope from this storm? Will a two-state solution emerge full-blown from the chaos? I do not know, if I ever did. I only sense that it is a moment ripe for great change. If it is seized, with courage and leadership. Or the moment will be blown into the past, joining a long-line of conflicts, at least since 1948. The impermanent solution that has prevailed for 75 years may well trouble the next generations with little end in sight.
Meditate for peace and reconciliation.