Blessed are the peacemakers.

There were many violent demonstrations just a week ago in many different cities in Europe. They were demonstrating against Israel and for peace. At least that’s what they think they were doing.
We get the same kind of idea from Hamas. They kill so that the Palestinian people can get a better future.
They teach their people systematically to hate the Jews. The Palestinian mass media is very much controlled by their leaders and journalists do well in reporting what these men like to see. The schoolbooks are full of propaganda. There is no way to escape being under this negative influence unless they learn to ask questions and not to accept everything they read and hear.

I remember a movie I saw some years ago. It was actually a psychological experiment put on screen:
A woman woke up in the morning and got ready for work. She felt just like any other day by the time she left the house.
At work her colleges had been instructed by a psychologist what to say to her as she arrived. He had “distributed” sentences like : “ Wow, didn’t you sleep last night? “, “Are you OK? “, “Are you sure everything is all right with you? “, “You don’t look good”,
“ Oh, you look terrible today” ……. and so on.
In the beginning she smiled back and said that she felt great. It didn’t take long, however, till she actually felt bad and told her boss that she needed to see a doctor.

It will take more than food distributions and the rebuilding of houses to change the lives of the people in Gaza. Even to move them out and back to where their grandparents (or grand grandparents ) fled from , if that had been possible, is not the answer to their problems.
They call Gaza a prison. The fact is that their imprisonment is more a ”state of mind” than a physical condition. Their problem is that they are stuck in a certain way of thinking and that there will be no freedom or peace until that condition is being dealt with.
One definition of a fanatic is “one who cannot change his mind and who won’t change the subject.”

We know no freedom if our minds are not free and we cannot be peacemakers unless we have peace.

Elin Elkouby.