A Framework For Peace

I sat next to Rachel and John Goldberg-Polin one night in Chicago at the Convention.

Each wore a handwritten “318” patch.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The number of days our son Hersh has been held hostage.”

He had been attending a music concert to celebrate his 23rd birthday.

Yesterday, Hamas murdered him.

If Hamas one day murders 40,000 Americans and kidnaps 8.,000 more (the Israeli numbers, adjusted for population) . . . then hides beneath hospitals and schools to use, as human shields, the citizens who elected them . . . I wonder how we will respond.

And (not necessarily the same thing) how we should respond.

And how many college students would take Hamas’s side the very next day, even before we did respond.

Netanyahu is a nightmare.  Israel’s religious extremists (like all religious extremists) are a nightmare.  The situation in the region is tremendously complex and tragic beyond words.

But how many pro-Hamas college kids know that Israel voluntarily left Gaza in 2005, forcing its own citizens to abandon their homes and greenhouses and irrigation systems?  And that instead of their accepting this surrender and becoming prosperous, peaceful neighbors, as hoped, Gazans built a 300-mile underground military-industrial complex with the avowed aim of destroying Israel?

That context, it seems to me, matters.

So, one hopes, might this:

Former Israeli Prime Minister and Palestinian politician sign framework for peace.

Let us pray sanity somehow gains traction.