January 2, 2009
The following was written by a very dear friend….
Shiv’a is the traditional seven day mourning period observed by Jews at the loss of a loved one…..
In this report, Deb describes the suffering of just one Palestinian family, one of hundreds…
Shiv’a in Gaza: December 2008
By Deb Reich
My heart has been broken so many times, writes Alice Walker somewhere, that it feels like an open suitcase with the wind blowing through it… But maybe, she muses, hearts are made to be broken, and what is required of us is simply a steadfast acknowledgment: Open up and let the wind blow through; that’s what hearts are for.
If so, Gaza 2008 is good cardiac training.
I am an American-Israeli Jewish woman of 60 living now in an Arab town in Israel and working for Jewish-Palestinian-Arab-Israeli reconciliation. I have two friends in Gaza and I will tell you how we came to be acquainted.
The first step was simply refusing to be enemies. There are thousands of Palestinians and Jews like me, in the Middle East and worldwide, who refuse to be enemies. We rarely make the headlines in your local paper, but we are here. One day we will prevail - not over anyone, but with everyone together. We are creating a new reality together and the paradigm, sooner or later, will shift decisively. Meantime, people needlessly bleed and suffer and die and mourn; the scenarios are endless but the outcomes are identical: death, injury, pain. What distinguishes Gazan suffering at the moment is that the noncombatants have nowhere to run to. The borders are sealed. The bombs fall. The world watches....
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