I’m not sure that I even know what to say about this except that the Israelis are not even pretending to be serious about peace. This is land that Palestinians are living on near Bethlehem and according to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, The announcement follows the cabinet’s decision last week to take over the land in response to the June kidnapping and killing of three teenage Jewish boys by Hamas militants in the area. I guess that it is just a case of Lebensraum but, still it makes me sad.
I think that I will just quote Emily Hauser, a Jewish activist, and leave it at that.
On hope, losing.
The Ten Stages of Losing Hope:
Stage One – You have hope, but wow. Things are bad.
Stage Two – You have hope, but sometimes you’re not sure why.
Stage Three – You refuse to give up hope. Despair is a luxury.
Stage Four – Your heart clings to hope even though your head tells your heart that it’s a fool, and with increasing frequency.
Stage Five – You believe that you have lost all hope, and then something terrible happens, and you lose a little bit more, which means you must have had some hope left to lose.
Stages Six, Seven, and Eight – Repeat Stage Five, each time with a smaller sliver of previously unsuspected residual hope.
Stage Nine – You genuinely have no hope left, but you continue to behave as though you do, because you believe that the performance of hope has value.
Stage Ten – You give up.
As regards Israel/Palestine, I reached Stage Ten in February. For that and other reasons, I’m going back to school next week to get a second Masters Degree, this one in Library and Information Science.