A Jewish friend came to cry

on my shoulder yesterday and I do not feel as if my shoulders are big enough.

Somewhere else in this blog, a long time ago now, I know I wrote about her. I wrote about her, her family..and their Palestinian friends.

They were living in Jerusalem at the time. They visited each other's home. The young Palestinian child with severe physical disabilities and almost no contact with children his own age found friendship with her children. Neither family wanted any part of the conflict that was occurring then. They want no part of it now but they have become part of it.

My friend wept for the death of her friends and I confess I did too. Even writing this is hard.  The family were still friends.. They had remained friends despite everything which had happened around them. All of them condemned what happened a year ago today.  

I long ago learned there are many different views about what is going on in that volatile situation. Yesterday the reminder was like a thump in the chest. It physically hurt. That small boy for whom I wrote a series of communication boards was a young man, a young man in a wheelchair with no intelligible speech but a sharp and inquiring mind was dead. His parents and his two sisters were also dead. 

No, they were not killled in an air strike but by men who are supposedly on "their" side of the conflict. It may have been accidental. It may have been a case of mistaken identity, a belief that a wheelchair was being used as a potential improvised explosive device by those they see as the enemy. We simply do not know. We will never know.

What I do know is that another family has been wiped out, a family which wanted no part in the conflict. They would have worried about the protests taking place today. They would have strongly objected to the leader of the terrorist group which controls their country being compared with Nelson Mandela.  

I had not communicated with that little family for some years but I still feel upset and angry because they were good people and I suspect the vast majority of those around them feel as they felt. They want it all to stop. They do not want a nation wiped out. They want to live with them - peacefully. 

As-salam ealaykum A....   'Ana 'ahmiluk fi qalbi' 

M... asked me to write this. Shalom M...