According to the AP, the recent escalating violence in Israel has resulted in a total of eight Israelis’ death and forty Palestinians. Many are remarking on the sad fact that both the assailants and their targets have been as young as thirteen and fifteen years old.
A group called The Parents Circle is comprised of Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost children to violence, and this weekend set up a “tent of reconciliation” in the Israeli city of Jaffa. NPR reports that the goal is to establish a safe place where Palestinians and Israelis can talk to one another.
Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian whose daughter was killed by Israeli border police in 2007, speaks about the recent violence, “When I see what the Israelis show, in their media and their TV — Palestinian violence, Palestinian terrorists stabbing knives, throwing stones for nothing — they don’t understand what’s happening there. And the other side, what the Palestinians see — they see racism, brutality. We see checkpoints … Palestinians murdered for nothing. There’s no human rights… And this is how we invest in more blood, in more violence without…. hope. They have no peace process to let the people understand that, in the end, we need to find a solution.”
Robi Damelin, an Israeli whose son was killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2002, spoke of the young people, and wants them “to really think about what they’re doing to stop the violence. Because what is happening is they have no idea what the consequence, in the long term, will be to this violence.”
