Last week, at least 120 Palestinians, including many children have been killed by bombs dropped by Israeli forces.

Also last week, a young Palestinian taxi driver, 25 years old and about to get married with an apartment waiting for him walks into Mercaz HaRav Jewish religious seminary in West Jerusalem and showered gunfire on students, two of them 15-year-olds, using an assault rifle and handgun. Eight people were killed.

Suicide attacks and hundreds of civilian deaths, everyone looses… a bloody cycle of horrific violence lasting for longer then I have been alive.

The more I read these stories year after year and the more I imagine how horrible and vicious both tragedies are, I feel great sadness and a feeling of hopelessness that the cycle of violence will not stop. I also can’t help but blame both the Palestinian and the Israeli leadership for not doing more to resolve this conflict. Where is the United Nations? I know the issues are complex and the challenges in negotiating are greater then any other in the world, but there must be a way out. Its just unimaginable to comprehend how human beings can continue do that to each other for so many years.

The hope inside of me that rational people, how ever long it will take, will prevail never dies.

Here is an article I found from Rabbi Michael Lerner from Israeli E News, he is an American rabbi and an editor in a Jewish magazine Tikkun (I must admit I am not familiar with his works but here is what he said):

“Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives unequivocally condemn the killings of students at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem today. Just as last week we prayed for a speedy recovery of Israelis and Palestinians wounded in the fighting in Gaza and the bombings of Sderot, so today we pray for a speedy recovery for those who were injured in this ghastly attack. The wounds of two thousand years of exile and the holocaust are inevitably restimulated by this kind of attack, and tragically the price will likely be paid by Palestinian civilians, who in turn will fight back and then the price will be paid by other Israelis. Thus the seemingly endless cycle of violence will continue.

We at Tikkun feel equally grieving for the people killed by vicious and immoral terrorists at the Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav (the ultra-nationalist religious center that developed the ideology which inspired religious Zionists to believe that they had a God-given right to settle and hold on to the territories without regard to the consequences for the Palestinian people already living there) as we do for the victims of Israeli terror (which in the past week killed 120 people, many of them children, many of them sitting in their homes when Israeli troops randomly fire-bombed and murdered them, as documented by the same international human rights organizations that today condemned the attack in Jerusalem by terrorists). We understand that these killings can only be understood in the context of the 60 year old struggle between these two communities, and that nothing short of a full peace accord that will require a new open-heartedness on both sides can possibly break this horrible cycle of violence.

We similarly mourn the people in Sderot and Ashkelon terrorized by bombs from Hamas, as we did for those people who die in the Gaza and West Bank areas because the check points prevent them from getting to the doctors they need, and the many children suffering from malnutrition because of Israel’s slow starvation of the country and cutting off of supplies. Of course there is no “moral equivalency” here, because as Talmud and other religious and spiritual traditions teach, every single life lost is a unique tragedy, and no life lost can be compared to or the loss justified in terms of the life lost of others.

From our standpoint, all violence, whether overt or built into the institutions of economic and political reality, is a sin and unacceptable, whether done by the powerful or the powerless. Violence is the wrong path. So this week in Beyt Tikkun synagogue we will say kaddish for the young men killed at the yeshivat ha rav, and for the people killed in Gaza by Israeli troops, Israelis killed in Sderot and Ashkelon, and for the million two hundred thousand Iraqis killed by the US occupation of Iraq and the 4000 American soldiers killed in that war. And all the victims of wars in Africa and Asia, all the victims of oppression and murder in China and Tibet, all the victims of oppression in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Lebanon and Syria and Egypt.

When will they ever learn? Violence doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t create safety. The way to security is through a. recognizing “the other” as part of you, not an alien but as a fundamental part of “the unity of all being” created in the image of God and deserving just as much as we deserve, and entitled to live at the same standard of living and with the same political rights as we have and receiving the same compassion we would give to our friends….”

How many people will die before this message of peace gets accepted by all sides…