Ashamed and proud 2023

THE WAY THINGS ARE

Old Cypriots say the youth have lost their traditional friendliness, heads in phones. Hope lives. While food shopping my card blanked, so I separated necessities and paid cash. A young man called, ‘Kyria, I’ll pay.’ pointing to what I’d left. Despite telling him it was OK, he said. ‘It’ll save you coming back, it’s Christmas, let me do this.’ He refused repayment and insisted, ‘It’s a gift’ and meant it. His parents should be proud of him.

All children deserve protection. My Syrian neighbours are proud of their youngsters to whom I’m a granny figure. We communicate in Greek. If anyone tried to hurt them verbally or physically, I’d defend them to the best of my ability as I would an innocent Jewish, Asian or African child. These families are legal, seeking sanctuary as Irish and Greeks had to when economic or dire situations drove them from home, as I recently told a man angered by foreigners in his children’s school.

There are opportunists, but there are those who work long, hard hours for family, relieved they are growing in safety. On a bike, manners or shameful lack of them, become painfully evident. Always, the Asian delivery lads in an all-weather, low-paid job, treat an elder with courtesy on the road. The worst offenders are middle-aged women in big cars, beeping impatiently at me on a narrow street, a car parked left, one coming on my right, as though I could lift off to save them seconds.

Kahlil Gibran wrote ‘…too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among the hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.’ I thought of that when I heard of Palestinian kids stripped to underpants in winter cold by Israeli Defence Forces under the pretext they might have hidden weapons.

Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times quoted Yossi Klein Halevi’s essay on the future of Israel. Halevi’s fear, shared by many of his compatriots, was that their secular state was being liquidated by their own far-right government. Was making Gaza ‘a land of tents’ and brutally downsizing the demographic while opportunity lasted a more important political aim than getting back hostages alive? Why a drone-specific strike on Hamas in Lebanon but bomb-pounding Hamas in Gaza?

I have never before last year felt so ashamed to be labelled ‘Western’ although proud Ireland voted for a ‘immediate, durable, sustainable, humanitarian ceasefire for Gaza’. We witnessed the USA, the UK and some EU members let intense bombardment in such a small space, murder of thousands and others buried alive, back a way beyond reasonable retaliation for Hamas’ hideous slaughter.

Ukraine is bombed, loud protests about civilian hits and talk of using confiscated Russian cash to rebuild long-suffering Ukraine. Who will rebuild long-suffering Gaza? History will be harsh on those who silently, impotently watched coldly the death by disease, destruction and deprivation. The Red Sea issue is just the start of payback, and when innocents die in international terror attacks, Western powers will bear a weight of the blame.

Encouraged by their lassitude, Netanyahu protects himself by dragging it out. With Western support he went beyond what human decency, let alone international law, allows while Israeli hostages endure misery, and children on both sides will carry physical and hereditary mental trauma. An Arab neighbour said, ‘If Gazans had a symbol like the Star of David on their clothes, would it make them oppressed humans not numbers? Have Jews the monopoly on pain?’

The expediencies of WWII victors requires a 21^st century landscape change. The EU gives each small state an equal vote, for now. The UN needs teeth and not just a sympathetic mouth. Undemocratic vetoes have no place in a body comprised of many nations at times hamstrung by the Kingdom of the Few.