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OPERATION CAST LEAD: WHO CREATED THE JEWS?
More than five years ago, during Israel's 2008-09 twenty-three-day largescale offensive war on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, my little daughter, Shymaa, who was only five years old, asked me and my wife a question that still puzzles me, as on several occasions it has become my own. Amidst the sounds of explosions and the smell of gunpowder, her question, in her soft, shaky voice, came as a shock to both of us. "Who created the Jews?" she asked, looking me in the eyes and then turning to her mother in anticipation of an answer. For a while, neither of us was able to talk, let alone answer her question. Bemused, I offered to tell her a story, and several other stories followed.
If I could not answer her question, one thing I did know was why Shymaa, in the space of a few weeks, had grown up enough to ask such a profound question. She must have thought that the merciful and loving God she learns about in her kindergarten, Who usually saves the good guys in her mother's stories, could not be the same God who created those killing machines that for long days and nights brought us nothing but death, chaos, destruction, tears, pain, and fear, causing her and her little brothers to wake up at night and sob hysterically. Her version of God could not be the creator of the same people who caused our windows to shatter and who, two days earlier, shot at her father when I was filling water tanks on the roof of our house during the two-hour ceasefire.
Israel's Operation Cast Lead murdered more than 1,400 Palestinians and injured thousands, most of whom were children, women, and elderly people. Many of the injured are now disabled for life, and many of the martyrs leftchildren and wives orphaned and widowed for life. Five years ago, Israel destroyed more than 6,000 housing units. More than 20,000 Palestinians were made homeless, some forcibly displaced for the fourth or fifth time in their lives. The war came after a long siege that Israel is still imposing on Gaza, a siege that has leftalmost all aspects of life paralyzed. Israel targeted infrastructure, schools, universities, factories,...