And so it is

I am rarely lost for words.  Ask anyone, I can talk…a lot.  I can also write reams and reams.  But I am lost for words.  I am just so angry and frightened, horrified and sorry, terrified and just plain sad that for the last week or so I just haven’t known what to say.

Three days ago I was dropping my twins at nursery when the alarm sounded.  I ran back to the classroom and accompanied 30 4-year-olds to a shelter.  The boom came seconds later.  We waited and then we all trooped out again.  Normality resumed.  Or our reality at least.  This experience affected me more than any of the other sirens, any of the earlier experiences of this messed up situation. I saw the faces of the children who just carry on as this is normal.

I have read a lot, a lot about the situation.  I have listened to Israelis, Palestinians, British, American, European points of view but it just makes me more angry and more sad, it doesn’t make any more sense.  Because that’s just it, the situation doesn’t make sense.  The suffering, the deaths, the injuries, the terror, it just doesn’t make sense.

All I ask is that everyone does as I do.  To listen to all sides.  To try to understand that this is not a black and white, goodies versus baddies, David versus Goliath situation.  In today’s warfare there is nothing simple.  And who pays the price?  The citizens, the innocents who are unable to control their own destinies, who often don’t know what is being done in their names’, right under their noses.  Haven’t the people of this region suffered enough?

Nobody wants their children to grow up in fear with terror a part of their everyday world with bombs and rockets and hate as part of their everyday language.  My 4-year-old son told me that we go to the shelter because ‘people want to kill us’, he told me he dreamt of something long that came from the sky and gave him a bump on the head.  My 6-year-old can explain how the iron dome system works, my 4-year-old daughter doesn’t like being trapped in the shelter, as we go in and close the door she wants to get out.  I don’t want to try to compare what we are experiencing with others.  I know there are people on both sides of the fight who are suffering far, far more.  I also don’t see why I have to apologise for my fear for the future and the days ahead for me and my family.  It may not be as bad but is this a normal way to live?

And so it is and it looks like it will be for the near future and who’s to say that if peace comes it will last for more than another couple of years.  I look to those who hate, to those who make the decisions to make the right ones, for once.  To end this.  To stop the killing and the bombs and the rockets, before there is no going back.