Today the Israelis are mercilessly bombing Lebanon, after, they say, the Shiia Hezbollah. Hezbollah is launching small rockets across the border into northern Israel. Hamas, elected by the Palestinians to govern them, is allowing, encouraging or unable to stop its own armed wing from attacking Israel across the plantation borders.

For my part, I am reading English history.

The Statute of Kilkenny (1366) “forbade intermarriage, fosterage, or other intimate relations between the English and the Irish in Ireland, and any use, by the English, of Irish speech, customs, or dress, on pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of property. No Irishman was henceforth to be received into any English religious organization; and no Irish bards or storytellers were to enter English homes.” (from Durant’s Story of Civilization, VI, The Reformation.)

The Irish, of course, won their independence from Great Britain only in 1922 after decades of hard fought struggles, including civil-war on the island between home rulers and British loyalists.

As late as 1972 when I was hitchhiking in western Ireland and got picked up by an English driver ethnic disgust persisted. She thought the Irish to be dirty, lazy, over-sexed (too many children), loud, lying drunks.

The lesson here need not be thus are humans and thus they shall be for ever, though that springs to mind. It certainly has been true that enmity built over years of dominance & submission, the control of one people by another, takes years to take down; not equal time but in human terms, a long time.

It is also true that however cruel the British were, and they were, they did not have fighter-bombers and 500 pound bombs. The Irish had pitch forks, fire and in the last centuries of the struggle, flint-locks. In the last decades both sides had semi-automatic weapons and, for then, large scale explosives. The IRA could not reach Liverpool, however with Kaytusha rockets.

The great Armitsar massacre in 1919, by British and Indian troops of Indian civilians — mostly Sikh — was done with merely .303 inch rifle shot, several thousand rounds, killing one thousand (officially, only 390). There were no tanks, howitzers, rocket propelled grenades or IEDs.

As with humans and the environment so with humans and humans: technology is a force multiplier so great that what once were local tragedies and terrors now explode on the world stage over night.

All I see today is imminent peril. The Jews and Arabs do not have 800 years to work out their differences as the English and Irish have mostly done. The long term solution of making murderous behavior as unthinkable as cannibalism may not have time to run. What to do today, tomorrow? If only it were as easy as saying to all parties: Shut up and go back to your rooms!

Catholic murdered Protestant murdered Catholic in Ireland in the 1640s; barbarously. Since the end result is living in modest harmony in the same places, why not skip the ugly parts?

If only we had men and women of stature and strength of character at the national level; a President who could say to Israel: yes I am your friend. As your friend I am telling you, your behvior is endangering your own citizens; it is endangering mine — to no discernable end. The destruction of all of Lebanon, the re-annexation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and a diaspora of all Palestinians will not make Israel more secure. The adrenline rush of revenge will not protect your children.

If only the great Imams of Islam could issue fatwa to follow fatwa that the murderous behavior of too many, must cease.

The operative belief of all those with weapons that punishment will change behavior is only true for some of the people, some of the time, though the belief persists through the centuries and increases as power grows.

In Henry VIII’s England a young woman, Anne Askew, insisted to her inquisitors that God could not be a small round piece of bread. “Let it lie in a box for three months, and it will be moldy,” she told them. And she was tortured until nearly dead. She did not recant her heresy and went to her death “as merry as one that is bound toward heaven,” according to one contemporary report.

Neither will bombings of children by belted-killers on buses or bombings of children from airplanes under cover of national self-defense change behavior — except perhaps to accept more and participate in more muder.

We don’t have much time, it seems to me, to understand ourselves and the other, to throw off the shackles of ignorance and denial, to let light up the mirror neurons of empathy and common purpose. Life for those we know and love means letting live those we do not know but can imagine.