Every Life is Precious
JVL Introduction
Here Jewish Voice for Peace write about the importance of every life and questions why the death of the six Israeli hostages has received so much coverage and with so much information about them and their lives and yet we know little or nothing about the 100 Palestinians killed last weekend. While written from a US point of view but applies equally to the UK and, I would assert, most western countries. What are we told about the lives of the more than 40,000 who have been killed since October 7th in Gaza or the many who have been killed in the West Bank or while held as prisoners by Israel. Or the huge numbers killed by Israel before October 7th when, on average, ten Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli. The deaths are even more disproportionate now with up to 40:1 in Gaza and up to 50:1 in the West Bank. The dehumanisation has to stop!
Like Jewish Voice for Peace and many other organisations across the world, we have been working to stop this war for 11 months; 11 terrifying months for Palestinians in Gaza and now escalating into the West Bank where there have also been air strikes and displacement.
Join the march in London on Saturday 7th September if you possibly can and help to keep up the pressure on our leaders. There is no military solution, what is needed is political will and determination.
LL
This article was originally published by Jewish Voice for Peace - The Wire on Wed 4 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
Every life is precious
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As always it’s curious the details, usually quite small, one remembers from events decades past. I’ve always remembered what David Frost said in That Was The Week That Was after JF Kennedy’s assassination. The same day a coach load of children crashed and there were many casualties, a story that was wiped off the news by the JFK story.
Frost said that fact underlined that, contrary to the ‘death the leveller’ paradigm (as in the poem generations of schoolchildren had to learn), really death was the great revealer of differences.
The JVP piece above highlights that melancholy truth yet again. As humans we’re very good at empathising, cooperating, helping altruistically, mourning when we’re presented with facts about “our” in-group and not when people are perceived as comprising an out-group. We need somehow more than ever before to convince the world that, as Professor Sheldon Solomon (of Terror Management Theory) said recently, “Our in-group is everybody” (even if it sounded a bit “Walt Disney”).