Sharon Chaplik is a mother of two who lives in Yehud and immigrated to Israel from Kenya 11 years ago.
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Poetry and war
By Sharon Chaplik   March 28, 2001

I shake my head in disbelief as my hand casually turns the newspaper page to the next item. Yesterday, one killed in an attack; today three dead; last night shooting incidents but no casualties and it goes on. We have become a saturated society. Our reactions and thoughts hang suspended in a clouded conscience. There is no right or left in death, nor is there any justice; there is only finality.

Where is your voice? Why is mine so little and strained? The streets are devoid of people demanding an end to this. Our lives go on as normal interrupted by occasional, and now daily, briefings of horror. The city squares still display pretty flowers in spring bloom. The everyday shootings in the settlements sound to us as coming from a distant world. Hebron is under siege and so are the settlers. How can both sides live side by side under such a heavy blanket of armament?

Enmity and anger are besieging the whole nation. To think that one can hate so much as to wrap himself up in explosives. We have plunged back into the biblical eye for an eye. Where do our killed and wounded children fit into this?

To shake our heads at these reports is not enough; these are widening circles of violence and pain. What about the injured? What about the trauma imprinted on their lives -- do they not deserve any say? Why do we only take note of this when they are shown briefly on national television after an attack? Do their lives return to normal?

Why are we constraining ourselves to the media frenzy of numbers? We cannot let the dead and injured become mere statistics. Within our own borders, if we listened a little more closely to each other, if we were more accepting and tolerant of each other, if we were to unite as one people then surely Israel would prevail.

Today we are in danger of a house divided and the national Israeli slogan of "it will be okay" is running out of time. There is only now and it is only ourselves who can bring an end to this.

Poetry and War
How unsuited they are to each other
But when we have bled dry
Perhaps it is only words that might still ring of a truth
Long buried in the battlefield.

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