Excerpt from a Speech by Bernard-Henri Lévy at the Academic College of Netanya, June 18, 2018,
My thoughts go, each Friday, to the Jewish families, neighbors of the border, who see their fields burned by incendiary bombs of Hamas, their schools targeted by its rockets and who live under the fear of this horror: They are well placed to know that Hamas' calls are not just simple words but that they are meant to kill.
But my thoughts also naturally go to the Palestinians themselves: these Palestinians out of breath and hope, crushed by misery, these Palestinians so adroitly manipulated by their local leaders and by outside suzerains that they come-and it breaks the heart-to use their own children as bombs and human shields.
This anguish, this is the distress of the Jewish soul which has been so exposed to suffering that she is unable to resolve herself to inflict it.
This is the dread of the Jewish soldiers, often nearly just children, who I know are too humane to be cruel, to become intoxicated by their own force and to ignore that to fire on people, and to kill, is to violate all the commandants that they received.
This is the anxiety of the Jewish people who, while, everywhere in the world, death speaks in its loud and sinister voice, reminds himself of his history and ponders the limits of what one cannot overcome when you are the people whose life line, somber and luminous, has been so often attacked and shattered by death.
This article is an elaboration of one anecdote in last week's feature New Yorker piece:
How Trump and Three Other U.S. Presidents Protected Israel's Worst-Kept Secret: Its Nuclear Arsenal
Dennis Ross: Arab Leaders Need to Play a More Prominent Role in Peace-Making than They Ever Have Before
