Summer Rains

"Israel is exacting a deadly revenge on the Palestinians after its failure to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon. More than 200 Palestinians--44 of them children--have been killed and thousands forced to leave their homes since the beginning of Operation Summer Rains, the name the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gave its 10-week-old intensified assault on Gaza."

"Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because 'God chose us.' Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.

But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).

Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?" - Amira Haas, Haaretz, Sept. 2, 2006.

To those Xians who see the world through a bombsight, I plead that you will at least look at the children that have been killed by American-made weapons over the past two months in Gaza. Is this what the lamb shows us in the visions of Revelation? Are these the signs that thrill us with hopes of Christ's coming? When we make ciphers of the lives of human beings by those animated with inhuman absolutes, then our Christianity becomes a cipher as well. Then Christianity becomes a matter of unreal "miracles" and fantastic "revelations" that reveal nothing but our own inner poverty.