Evacuation from Gaza (Update)

Just in ... e-mail from a very dear friend:

I don't know what you guys are seeing on your TVs but what I am hearing on the constant radio coverage makes me proud. The way the cops and the army are dealing with the evacuation of Gaza is amazing. These kids (the soldiers and the police) are being cursed, lectured to, intimidated, abused manipulated by people using their babies as emotional levers, weeping settlers,  people genuinely miserable about having to leave their homes after 30 years together with hooligans who came to make trouble and noise and are doing everything to try and stall the withdrawal. And they, the army and the fuzz are doing the job. Cool, not intimidated, not reacting to abuse, sometimes with tears in their eyes.

Update:

I think Huw's comment should go here too:

Yeah Tamar, I like the thought that springs from your comment of a "Hugging Army" or a "stroking police force".
I wonder at the way these kids were prepared, trained for this task. Imagine you're barely out of your teens, hormones screaming through your veins, its hot, they are pouring water and oil and acid and abuse and blows on you, and somehow you manage to behave like Jesus. I would love to have witnessed their training. Did they read the Baghavad Ghita to them? They must have given a feeling of great confidence, fear would have caused them to respond with violence.
I suppose that for a Hugging Law and Order Unit (How's "Jesus police"?) to work there needs to be a common infrastructure of belonging between the police and the policed (a knowledge that "we are basicly the same, we are brothers and sisters and nephews and grandchildren").
For that to work accross "tribal" boundaries one needs really strong philosophy.

Comments

[Tamar]

I think what this discussion has reinforced for me is the fact that life is complex, and which is why I thought Chaim Yavin's documentary was so well done.

For we have seen with these events how gentle and compassionate an army can be. It can be done. We all see the tragedy for children who have no choice as they learn from horrific life experiences and the adults who teach them right from wrong.

All of a sudden "good guys" become "bad guys" and vice versa. Boundaries become blurry and we are confused. People we were taught to hate, now we are told to love.

How then, can one man (and, sadly, it usually is a man)tell us who is evil and who not? Who are sinners and who not? And we follow blindly without constantly asking difficult and uncomfortable questions over and over again?

When we declare something is an "Axis of Evil" first we wipe out millions of individual people (and, by the way, children are included in that definition) in our minds, and then allow ourselves the phyiscal act killing of them.

Mostly, I am so pleased that some of you have felt safe enough to comment here and share the complexity of it with all of us.

Thanks so much to Huw, Mark, Jean, Adriana, Ainelivia, and Sue for joining with me on this journey. For even as I live far away, I hold Israel close to my heart and my thoughts are there, lately, so much.

[Natalie]

Tamar, all I can do is to nod my head vigorously in agreement with everything you wrote in these comments.