Considering Gaza

Do friendly bakers still give customers a baker’s dozen — when you order 12 of something, do the doughboys or doughgirls still give you 13?

Probably some do, some don’t. But the friendly Green Dog is providing a baker’s dozen of something here, Bunkie.  Following are 13 quotations that when uttered or written had nothing to do with the internationally critical situation occurring now in Israel/Gaza.  Conversely, because of their sentiments, the quotations have everything to do with what’s been going on between the Israelis and Palestinians, now and for the past 60-plus years.

Read the quotations and see if you might agree…

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” — Jimmy Carter

“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.” – Agatha Christie

“I object to violence because when it appears to do no good, the good is only temporary, the evil it does is permanent.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” – Mahatma Gandhi

“What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.” — Robert E. Lee

“A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. – Nelson Mandela

“War-making doesn’t stop war-making. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago.” – Colman McCarthy

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“War, hatred, and violence all spring from one infernal idea: that one person, race, creed, or culture is better than another.” – Laurence Overmire

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” – Thomas Paine

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?” – Blaise Pascal

“And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.” – George Bernard Shaw

“It is a weakness of your human nature to hate those whom you have wronged.” – Publius Cornelius Tacitus

Like the preceding baker’s-dozen quotations, what’s been going on in Israel/Gaza is a complex situation of monstrous duration and proportions and consequences for both sides, each of which claims the moral high ground and each of which is right and each of which is wrong and each of which to varying degrees has been wronged.  The situation, of course, has involved wronged people who essentially are on neither side.

Logically considering Gaza and what surrounds the situation surely tests the reasoning of any commentator or analyst. Those who pass the test find fault with both sides as well as justification to some extent for what’s occurring on both sides — except any justification for the deaths and suffering of innocent people, including children, which Israel has inflicted to greater degree on Gazans in the name of defending itself against attacks by Hamas extremists in Gaza.