The children of Abraham weep. The children of Ismael weep.
Their loved ones were casualties of war.
They were killed by rockets and artillery and ordinances, fired by armies of terror, fired by war planes, without mercy.
When will this cycle of violence end?
Tensions in Israel and Palestine were running high after a protest march by Jewish Settlers in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah turned confrontational. The war broke out after the Israeli police raided the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.
It’s worth noting that the Muslim festival of Ramadan and the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which coincided this year, were both disrupted by the chaos and bloodshed of war.
Can there be a brighter tomorrow in the Middle East? When two neighboring nations hate one another, can there be lasting peace?
The taste of a bitter, hard-fought military victory appeases no one.
Gaza has been decimated. In Gaza, 1,800 housing units were destroyed and 14,315 were damaged.
The Israeli missile defense shield Iron Dome shot down 4,000 rockets launched at Israel by Hamas. Twelve Israelis died in the rocket barrage.
The concentration of rockets fired by Hamas and Islamic Jihad was the most intense and longest-ranging attack on Israel yet in a conflict that now spans two decades.
The Israel Defense Forces made hundreds of air strikes on Gaza targeting military intelligence, military tunnels and infrastructure; 248 Palestinians were killed in the air strikes on Gaza, 66 of whom were children.
In The West Bank, there were at least 15 Palestinians killed in fighting in the streets.
In the Israeli city of Lod, Arab mobs fought with police and armed gangs of Jewish settlers as synagogues were burned and businesses looted. Several mosques and Muslim cemeteries in Lod and Jaffa were desecrated by the Jewish settler mob in the mayhem.
When will the politicians achieve the lasting peace agreement they seek?
Not everyone has faith in a political solution to the fighting. There are deeper socio-religious fault lines here. This war will stop when both sides realize the price they pay for engaging in such a conflict is too heavy a burden to bear.
The Israeli Palestinian conflict is not just about warring ideologies of Jewish versus Muslim, it is a conflict of military occupation versus armed liberation.
For a ceasefire to work, the political and military leaders of Israel and Palestine must have a shared goal of living in a peaceful, tranquil, safe, and secure country.
The fighting in Gaza has stopped. The war between Israel and Hamas lasted for 11 days. On June 13, a new government in Israel led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid was sworn into office. With Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12 years as prime minister over, a new era in Israeli politics is dawning.
I sincerely hope that the new Unity government in the Israeli Knesset will lead Israel and the Palestinians to renewed dialogue. A two-state solution is the only reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Alex Goldblum is a photographer and filmmaker who traveled to Israel in 2010 and 2011 to conduct field research related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while in graduate school. He resides in Squirrel Hill.
First Published: June 20, 2021, 4:00 a.m.
