Chacun A Sa Facon...

I finally decided to start my blog. I am not sure how long it will last. What started me, like many others, is a certain frustration and a feeling of "impuissance" of being not capable to do something while seeing something/someone you love being killed destroyed hurt.

In my case, it is about my coutry Lebanon. It is about a massacre that Israel inflicted to my people in Qana today. It is about so many children once more paying the price of arrogance and terrorism. It is about another war...

Today, after I learned about the massacre I rushed to the news. I live in New York, I moved here four years ago. The location is important, because when the massacre happened I was sleeping or maybe having a drink somehwere in the city far away from the darkness of Beirut and the sound of Israeli planes and the screaming of these innocent children. I started reading and reading and then reading again. I wanted to learn everything I wanted to be there. I was upset frustrated sad. I had pity but quickly I thought that those people don't need people to pity them they need justice they need the world to point out the only criminal.

I was in a protest on Saturday here in New York. I was also in a couple of others few days earlier in Paris. Protests organized by lebanese and in one case other arab associations related to what is happening in Lebanon (and Gaza in the case of the NY protest). One thing striked me. Most of the slogans and many of the speeches barely mention the criminal Israel and eventually the US. As if people are afraid of calling terror by its name. What is the point of the protest? Asking for a cease fire they would say! not enough, I answer. The point is to call on the world to wake up to what Israel is doing to Lebanon to stop Israel's massacre. Period.

After reading the news and after my frustration calmed down. I started thinking. It became to me obvious today that one important question one needs to answer, a crucial question while we are looking into solving all these conflicts in this so dear middle east is the following. Does the state of Israel has still the right to exist?

I know that many people and most of you who might read this would find such questions unacceptable. I used to. This question has nothing to do with the right of the people living in today's Israel and Palestine in continuiing to live in this land. This question has nothing to do with antisemitism or putting the jews out or killing them etc... This question has to do with the solution that the UN came up with in 1947 to deal with the jewish problem.

I truly believe that if one is born in a place, and wishes to become citizen of this place, he should always have this right. Hence, I beleive that all the people born in Israel and Palestine have the right to live their to become citizen of this land. But I am not sure anymore that a state of Israel has anymore the right to exist. I am asking the question and I am ready to be convinced either way. What drove me to ask this question is that since the creation of this state, this state has been transformed into a killing machine. Whether Israel is right or not whether the arabs are the bad guys or not, whether they started it or not, it is obvious to all of us that this solution obtained by some countries voting for and others voting against did not bring a stable solution.

I invite these people to meet again and impose, as they did after they voted in 1947, another solution, one that takes into account almost sixty years of a bloody conflict.