http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2006/07/voice-of-peace-from-kiryat-shmona.html
Voice of peace from Kiryat Shmona
These pictures have been doing the rounds for a while now and they
appear on many websites.The same sites show the result of these signed
"gifts" from Israeli children.
Well someone calling themselves Gillian Henderson wrote to the Just
Peace list justifying these Israeli atrocities thus:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JustPeaceUK/message/18876
First of all the two girls are from kiryat shmona so they have
spent their entire lives in bomb shelters so i thinks its resonable
to be angry with the hizbullah.They are writing messages to
nazrallah not to the children of lebanon.And one other thing the
arab children are consatntly being shown in homicide bomber outfits
and at hamas railies but somehow the left seem to have little
outrage about that.
This led to the following response from my friend Inbar Tamari:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JustPeaceUK/message/18882
I'm really pleased that Gillian Henderson is concerned for the
welfare of children in my home town of Kiryat Shmona. This of
course will be ensured by teaching them to hate the children of
Lebanon -- who are the main beneficiaries of these gifts from their
Israeli neighbours. Bur these children are apparently not worth
Gillian's concern.
I grew up in Kiryat Shmona until I was 18, and I did spend time in
shelters, and was often evacuated; the girls in the photo were
presumably born after the end of regullar shelling, and have only
suffered from occasional attacks, always in response to a
delibarate Israeli provocation. I never thought the answer is in
hating the other side. During 82, when I was 18, I volunteered to
help in the bomb shelters and I often heard ordinary, working class
people linking and anticipating the Israeli bombing of Lebanon with
the bombs they would suffer later. It is simple and populistic to
fan hatred, it is much more time consuming and less rewarding to
fight for understanding. In 82 there were many peace demos in
Israel, including in Kiryat Shmona, by some people, including my
family and some of my friends, who believed in talk rather than
war. What these girls were doing was not the instinctive behaviour
of people from Kiryat Shmona; it is taught behaviour, part of the
construction of a common enemy.
Inbar Tamari