‘Ours not to reason why…’

‘IAF airstrike kills Gaza terror chief’                                                              Times of Israel: January 22, 2014

Six words that make up a headline we’ve all seen so many times before. But what else does it signify? It can only mean more deaths, more rocket attacks, more airstrikes and, no doubt, more of the same thereafter.

This has been the pattern for decades and still no one seems to know how to stop it.

Maybe, secretly, no one wants to stop it. But why ever not?

Is it all part of some death-wish cult into which Palestinians and Israelis are initiated at birth and have somehow neglected to inform the rest of us?

Do people in the region feel that they are overpopulated in some way and need their numbers thinned out so that local resources can better accommodate the needs of those who remain?

Are we witnessing a titanic game of subtle strategy played out on behalf of Jehovah and Allah to see who gets to sit with Them at the big table in the sky – and who does not?

Or is it merely that old-fashioned and very basic territorial imperative in operation, both sides battling each other for living space, neither one able to force the issue in what has long been the ‘traditional’ manner?

Well, whatever the reason, after 66 years in which most of us have been willing or unwilling spectators of this escalating conflict, a chance to finish with it once and for all may be within reach.

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And maybe, by finally working out just what it is we have to do, we also discover that ‘ours had been to reason why’ all along.