I don’t know how to eliminate Hamas’ leadership, but I know it can’t be done like this.
This is not what the Jewish people I know stand for; nor is it what the survivors of centuries of persecution would ever imagine doing to another benighted people. Surely not?
In my darkest moments, I feel like this is the coming together of forces beyond anyone’s power or imagination to solve, perhaps the end of something, or the beginning of the end of something else. It is a war waged on children by adults, a war waged on the future by the past, and it is a war that the world needs to stop right now ... and, yes, that means Australia, too, joining the family of nations on a United Nations vote calling for an immediate truce in Gaza.
You ask me how I feel? Not surprisingly, I also feel the terrible beauty of this moment. I see the jacarandas here in Sydney flowering at their most brilliant purple blue, and to my eyes they have never looked so exquisite. I see an October hunter’s moon in all its bright plumpness and I see lovers holding hands on the beach, parents with their small children, and they have never seemed so bound to one another as right now.
I see – and can still drink in – the spectacle of Paul McCartney on stage a few nights ago, singing the last lyrics of the last song the Beatles ever wrote, and I can feel the earth shifting on its axis, opening a narrow skylight of hope on the world.David Leser is a former Middle East correspondent and regular contributor to Good Weekend.
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