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27 Sivan 5768, Monday, June 30, 2008 4:51 IST

Cold darkness of absence

Sir, – Caroline Glick wrote with poignancy about the Schalit, Regev, and Goldwasser families that “in their unmitigated suffering, they cannot come to terms with this horrible fact because for them the country, and indeed the world, is made up of their loved ones. This is the natural human condition. Each person’s world is defined by the presence and absence of his loved ones. For the Goldwassers, Regevs and Schalits, Israel is a meaningless, cold, dark place when it doesn’t include their sons” (”Not a personal affair,” June 27).

Gone is Ms. Glick’s bitterness. Gone is her rhetoric. Gone are her polarizations. Hasn’t she, perhaps unwittingly, pointed us to the reason for the intensity and interminableness of the conflict? Both sides’ living victims’ worlds are divided into the “cold darkness of absence” and the – to them – impudent and insulting presence of those “with blood on their hands.”

Assigning any single, ultimate blame for the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, seems as impossible as the question of the priority of the chicken or the egg. The original people are either long dead, or, as in the case of 1947-49, only a few older ones remain with cherished and contradictory memories.

In the meantime, only living people, Israelis and Palestinians, can either cease or continue this conflict.

“Personal stories are always powerful. Whether they are tragic, titillating or irritating, they never fail to attract our attention,” Glick wrote. What else does this century-old conflict and hatred ultimately consist of but ramifications of personal stories? For the conflict to ever end, the living people, victims on both sides, need to be released from their grief and anger and hatred.

JAMES ADLER
Cambridge, Massachusetts