Kibbutz Malkiya

Watching the excessive pounding of Lebanese villages, its hard to sympathise with the odd rocket hit on Northern Israel. Lebanon is winning the media war by default. Sky News can scarcely hide its Jewish-lobby credentials, focussing on interviewing hawkish types like Netanyahu and avoiding any representation of the other side (in fairness, I imagine Al-Jazeerah and the other Arab channels are doing exactly the same in reverse). Its hard to find any humanity in all this. We now know that British airbases and weapons are complicit in the slaughter on the Israeli side. Knowing a little about the UK weapons trade, there are probably British-made weapons flying into Israel as well.

I think back to my Kibbutz Malkiya days in the late 1980's. I met many lovely people there, some of them scarred by earlier conflicts (a soldier in his late twenties who lost six of his friends in the Lebanon, a late middle-aged man who lost all his family to Auschwitz - he never spoke). Malkiya has yet to be hit this time round (it is right on the border with the exclusion-zone), but they have been bombed in the past. How do we retain our humanity in times like these?