It's uncanny sometimes, reading things I have written about politics or the world situation of the day, and realising that I could have read it the day before yesterday and no-one would have noticed that it was written ten or fifteen years ago. I guess that is why the Qur'an counsels patience so much. These events will just seem like petty skirmishes in the scheme of things when they are written on the pages of history.  

Researchers say that a child smacked by a parent will echo that behaviour, hitting out at younger siblings, or their toys. The fact that we don't like what is done to us doesn't necessarily mean that we learn not to do it to someone else. Those who grow up to be abusers have frequently been abused themselves.

Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, a day to remember that racist paranoia can lead to grotesque action if people are not seen as individuals, but classified by ethnicity or creed, excluded from justice, seen as less human than ourselves, fit only for colonization, enslavement or disposal.

Recent Arab Israeli hostilities make it easy to forget that it was nice cultured civilized Europeans like us who gassed jews by the millions, not Hizbollah terrorists. Before that, we tried to get rid of our jews by exporting them to somewhere we'd conquered. Israel sprang from a combination of European anti-semitism and colonialism.  

Visiting Israel, it always seems that the battle is not really between religions, but between the peoples and cultures of the east and west. The confrontation of attitudes and lifestyles is clear to see. Arab women walk with their families in the ancient streets dressed much as they might have a thousand years ago, while girls from the kibbutz strut amongst them wearing less than Las Vegas showgirls.

For the old Arab majority is now ruled by a minority equipped with colonial attitudes and overwhelming force. State of the art weaponry against not much more than slingshot and stones and a burning sense of injustice. When such force is used to give preference based on race, injustice is the recipe for disaster, not some innate barbarity of the natives.

All Arabs are not terrorists. If so many Hizbollah recruits are active in Lebanon, it's hard to imagine how the hundreds of missiles and thousands of shells have managed to miss them all. Those considered guilty by ethnic association, however, have more than thirty dead, a hundred injured, and nearly half a million refugees.

If peace is to be seen as preferable to war, justice must be seen to be on offer. The underdogs have few options. Surely it would make more sense for those now empowered to prefer a Do-as-you-would-be-done-by policy over Do-as-you-have-been-done-to.