Distraction

It is easy to be blinded by suffering. In the latest misadventure off the coast of Israel / Gaza, the latest reports available list sixteen dead at the hands of the Israeli commandos. Why did they people have to die?

Of course, the easy answer is that they didn’t have too. This morning on the Today Programme the beautifully-voiced Mark Regev defend the Israeli actions that led to the deaths of these unfortunates, along with injuries to many more; both flotilla crew and Israeli personnel. Naturally he claimed the Israelis were attacked first. I must have missed the event that led to members of the flotilla trying to board the Israeli warships. He also reminded the world that the Israelis had offered to take all allowed goods through the Israel-Gaza border. Since the central purpose of the flotilla was protest against the joint blockade by Israel and Egypt and to remind the world of the very real suffering of the Palestinian people, that is hardly the point.

It is easy to become hardened by suffering. Fear does that and fear is the state that the Israeli people are encouraged to live in. The world is against them, misunderstands their plight and that is why their forces, of which they all must play their part, must be aggressive because that is the only language that their barbarous and less sophisticated neighbours understand.

The rest of us, onlookers of various degrees, are asked to take sides by the competing and extremely sophisticated propaganda machines of all sides. For instance, this morning the BBC website initially reported the source of this morning’s tragedy as a Hamas report, despite the live streams coming from various Arabic news organisations onboard. Hamas = terrorists therefore their word is not to be trusted. As a quoted source, the link to Hamas has now been dropped and for the moment it is still reporting only ten deaths, as reported by the IDF.


Why does this matter and why should we onlookers care? I’ve been to Israel several times over the years and it is my opinion that all populations are being misled. Despite being a democracy, Israel in my opinion is also a police state. The population are under the heaviest possible surveillance from the internal security forces. One waitress I met in Haifa was an Arab Christian and formally worked as a receptionist at the hotel where I was staying. Her story was that she made a bad joke concerning the conflict to a guest. Next day, she gets a phone call.

"Hey Girlfriend, how are you?"
"Who is this?"
"You can call me David and I work for the Misrad Habitahon [internal security].  I hear that you have been saying things that you shouldn't have."
"What is it to you?"
"Next time that I hear such things, it won't be a friendly chat over the phone.  We will want to know more about you.  A visit to our offices.  Am I clear?"
The girl laughed at David.  "You are afraid of little me?  Some silly girl?  This country is weaker than I thought."

She kept her dignity but not the job.

The hotel where she used to work was often full.  On the last occasion the visitors were athletes and sports people from all over the world for the the Jewish games held last year.  Before that, I overheard many snatches of conversations.  The arms dealers were the ones that frequently drew my attention though.  On one flight across I was lucky enough to be upgraded.  My companion was a banker and the file he was perusing was for pilotless light aircraft, used for reconnaissance and attack roles.  It was his business to provide the money.  I remember reading Robert Fisk's accounts in his book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East ; of how he traced the history of one missile used by the Israelis in Lebanon back to the US Marine Corps and thus how the US tax pater is secretly being used to subsidise Israel's conflict with their neighbours.

So to my mind, this is why there is never peace in the Middle East: too many people are making too much money out of war.  It is not just the arms dealers, it is their financiers also.

The deaths this morning were totally unnecessary unless their purpose is to keep the fires of hatred burning brightly.  The secret fuel for this hatred is money and until the profit is cut, the war will continue.  I say this to both sides and of none.  Look up and see who among you are getting richer from this conflict.  To protestors for peace: research the companies who are making the profit.  Now most people don't tend to pop down to our local friendly arms manufacturer for a couple of SAM missiles, so look into the companies that they are dowing business with and the banks that are providing them with the finance and expertise.  Target these companies and people for protest, boycott and blockade, not normal people who are just as much victims as anybody else.  Governments who want peace, cut the flow of weapons to all sides and refuse entry to the warmongers.  If you won't then it up to your populations to hold you to account.

Protests like the flotilla are just a distraction from what is really happening.  In fact, by providing opportunities for needless death, they help to prolong the war.

Writing Again.

It’s rather alarming how quickly one can become institutionalised. From October I have been travelling; mostly between Edinburgh and Aberdeen at first but then northern Italy, Holland and as some of you who have read earlier blogs, several months in Israel. Within four days of my return from the Near East, I was out again, travelling to a rig off southern Norway with connecting flights via Denmark. The week following my return I was again in Aberdeen arranging for the sale of my house. So, last week is my first complete week back with the family and to be frank, it is a weird feeling. The rolling stone has finally stopped, at least for a little while.

One would think that being in one place would be a wonderful opportunity to catch up and of course I have with my loved one. But mentally I have just not been able to face anything else. This will be the week to catch up on other neglected business, one of those being writing.

I promised to have a think about the best way to approach the recent crimes committed in Gaza. Now, it is one thing for people like me to write that word, it is a very different thing to prove it. But the laws do exist for groups and individuals to take such allegations to a court of law. From Arabic sources, there was some criticism of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant for the Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir. The basis for this criticism is that it was seen mainly as a political act against a Western enemy. I wondered if Sudan was possibly a signatory to the ICC treaty. Of course it isn’t, but neither is Egypt, Syria, Iran, the USA or Israel. This is interesting as obviously the ICC’s remit covers crimes committed outside the signatory countries. Therefore I would suggest that those in the position of bearing first-hand witness to the recent events in Gaza pool their resources and gather evidence with the view of a submission to the ICC. An alternative avenue would be the Spain's courts, as Spanish law allows for an international arrest warrant to be issued against those charged with crimes against humanity, wherever the events were alleged to have taken place.

It is most probable that these processes are already underway. Why they are so important is this: Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians over the years have been widely and rightly criticised and being both immoral and unjust. By the same logic therefore, I cannot support the call for embargo and sanctions against Israel. Collective punishment is never right. The individuals who directly take the decisions to proceed in a manner that can be shown to be criminal should be the people who bear the responsibility.
Under liberal values, the rule of law has precedence over all other considerations. That fundamental of western society cannot be compromised: when it has been in the past critics have been quite correct in raising charges of hypocrisy.

Below I have included a link for the ICC which lists the 108 nations and territories that has signed its charter. Apart from the USA, other notable non-signatories include Russia, China, Pakistan and India. This is not to say that all is rosy in the gardens of those countries who have signed: members include Brazil and Columbia for instance. But the step of putting the law of law first, at least in principle, is an important one for any nation to take. It is a principle that should be applied equally: to those who are perceived to be our friends as well as our foes.


Chosen Links.

http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Home
http://www.icc-cpi.int/NetApp/App/MCMSTemplates/StatePartiesIndex.aspx?NRMODE=Published&NRNODEGUID={7A50B016-A0B6-43EB-AFF8-15FCEDC03D02}&NRORIGINALURL=/Menus/ASP/states+parties/&NRCACHEHINT=Guest#B

What Does Israel Want?

I like trivia. Especially quizzes. And the one in the Jerusalem Post that morning in early December was particularly tough. I only got four out of ten correct. One of the questions stuck with me though as particularly curious. “Outside which town is the proposed site of the new Palestinian airport.” I didn’t have a clue. Ramallah perhaps? Isn’t that the capital of the West Bank? No, the answer was Netanya. Now I know that Israel is really a small place, but I’ve been there and that is definitely still in Israel and not the West Bank. A curious fact which I have been pondering since.

* * *

By a telephone call, I had just been snatched from working on my house, again, flown overnight from Edinburgh via London to Tel Aviv and frankly I was pessimistic. My driver Momi was pumping me with questions “Martin, will they find anything? Is there gas there?” Having just left the rig six days previously, I had seen no indication of the major find that was about to take place. But that is the nature of exploration: one day there is nothing, the next the whole world wants to be your friend.
Gas was not the only thing on Momi’s mind that morning. “Our attack in Gaza will be a failure if the Hamas leadership survives. But what do they do? They hide under the hospital! We don’t want to kill civilians. Why can’t they hid somewhere else?”
Perhaps they weren’t very enthusiastic about being killed, I thought to myself. What did people expect? Hamas to move into a field so that they could be decently bombed?
“But Momi,” I said. “All the Arab states have said that if Israel retreats to the pre-1967 borders, there will be peace.”
“Why can’t these people accept that they lost! We won, they lost. Get over it and move on!”

The attack on Gaza is now over. Momi didn’t get his wish: the Hamas leadership did survive. But the effect on the people and the city are terrible and it will take years to rebuild. Personally I don’t think that matters much to Israel, even less now that the Tamar gas find is looming larger and larger in the public consciousness. The Saudi’s have already pledge $2 billion worth of aid to rebuild the territory. As I outlined in my previous article “Israel and Gaza – it’s a gas!”, the Palestinians could be a lot richer than they are if Israel had not been consistently blocking the development of the gas fields offshore Gaza. But on the grounds that profits would go to finance weapons for Hamas, negotiations were ended with BG Group and the company closed it’s offices in Tel Aviv in 2007. That was not the end of the story however: talks were restarted in 2008 in an attempt to convince BG Group to sell their stake in the Gazan gas fields to a new consortium, the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC).

Israel needs gas in order to secure water. The chosen method is the building of new desalination plants which are very energy-intensive. So Israel wants energy in order to deal with the effects of global warming. There is even an alternative to this however. Since I last commented upon this issue, I have been contacted by Terry Spragg who has been kind enough to outline to me a new technology for moving large volumes of fresh water across oceans without the need for container vessels, potable water tankers or laying pipelines. Known as the Spragg Bag, each individual section can hold up to 17,000 tonnes of fresh water, with what is claimed to be the world’s strongest zip fastener linking together up to five of these bags. The real smart trick however is that these bags can then be towed by a vessel as modest as a standard-powered tug boat. I can certainly see the value of this remarkable technology, especially in emergencies such as the one that Gaza is facing at this moment. Whether the Israelis will go for it to solve their own water issues, that is a matter which shall be considered in a moment.

There are a few more apparently random thoughts that I would like to add to the mix before struggling to some kind of conclusion. The first is Israel’s recently built security fence, or apartheid wall as it has been called by it’s critics. I think there is truth in both labels. As far as security is concerned, it seems to have worked. Well I was here in 2000, people were a lot more nervous. I was in a bar in Natanya which was then bombed the following week. Security was very tight within Israel. Now it is a lot more relaxed. But there are negatives to it as well. The routing of the wall was little more than a blatant land grab in many places. It’s main function however is to control, absolutely, the movement of people and goods into the Palestinian West Bank.

Likewise the withdrawal from Gaza. It was true that Israelis did withdraw people, but that is nothing like the same as granting the Palestinians within autonomy. The reason being is that the supply of goods and services remain in control of the Israelis. The bombing of the supply tunnels were justified on the grounds that these were the routes by which weapons were smuggled into the territories. Probably true, but they were also the way that most other supplies moved into Gaza too. Laying siege is not the same as granting freedom.

We finally return to the proposed Palestinian airport and why I love trivia. If the airport is built outside Netanya, it is obvious that Israel intends to remain in full control of the movements of people and goods into the West Bank. Just as in Gaza. Just as it was unhappy with the attitude of BG Group and is now pressing that company to sell out it’s stake to the Israeli-controlled IEC. What Israel wants more than anything else is total control over it’s land and resources. The political implications are even more obvious: there will never be a viable two-state solution because an independent Palestine will be outside the control of the Israeli government and this can never be tolerated.

Let us return to water. The gas is so valuable to Israel because it will allow the planned desalination plants to be powered independently of Egyptian supplies. The is an alternative however in the form of mass-importation of water from Turkey (a close ally of Israel) via giant water bags. But we have already seen the case for Israel’s love of control. I therefore think that importation of such a vital resource will not be looked upon favourably by the Israeli government. The only ray of hope I can offer Terry Spragg is this: it is Israel’s stated aim that the planned desalination plants are intended not only to supply the country with it’s water but are also to be used to replenish the depleted aquifers beneath the land. What if the fast-track to refilling the aquifers was not the desalination plants but by limited term importation from Turkey? This would mean that the desalination plants would not have to produce so much water and that the new finds off Haifa will last the country even longer. Hell, it would even be good for the environment!


Selected sources

IEC control
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2133287/?relatestories=1

Spragg Bags (and photo credit)
http://www.waterbag.com/

Please refer to my previous article “Israel and Gaza – it’s a gas!” for other references.

Gaza and Israel: it's a gas!

The semi-submersible drilling rig on location over the Tamar-1 well

It was bound to happen. Israel can’t carry on indefinitely it’s ruthless bombardment of Gaza. With only three days left before the inauguration of Obama and the 44th President of the United States of America, it wouldn’t look good if there wasn’t as least some form of ceasefire on the table by then. The last thing that Israel needs is to get off to a bad start with the new president.

It is therefore by total serendipity that the upcoming ceasefire follows on from one of the most fortunate events in Israel’s recent history: the discovery of potentially the largest hydrocarbon reserves the country has known. Since I am directly involved in the project, I cannot say much. But I can refer you to the various press releases made by partners and a government website, The Israel Export and International Co-operation Institute.

“The Tamar-1 drilling, some 90 kilometers west of Haifa, is considered the most promising of the potential drilling sites off Israel's coast. Initial estimates were of a 35% chance of finding a reserve of 87 billion cubic meters of natural gas.”

This is relevant to Gaza, as Michel Chossudovsky points out in his article The Israeli Invasion & Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields, there has been a long-running feud between Israel and Gaza as to the exploitation of the large gas reserves that were discovered off the coast of Gaza in the late 1990s. To this day, these gas fields lie unexploited because of blocks put on development by various Israeli governments. Following the election of Hamas, efforts were redoubled to ensure that the Palestinian authorities would not see any of the estimated $2 billion that the project would yield for the Palestinian people. These blocking efforts culminated in the intervention of Tony Blair with the operators BG Group (formally British Gas) when they finally lost patience with the Israelis and approached the Egyptians instead.
Chossudovsky puts the case that Israel, increasingly desperate for natural resources, planned Operation Lead Cast to be rid of Hamas, not to prevent a few rockets being fired, but to install a Palestinian authority which would be a more suitable partner for the exploitation of Gazan gas. In other words, effective annexation of the most valuable resource the Palestinians have.

Why does Israel need this energy so badly? On top of the normal needs of a modern society, Israel is having to face another more pressing crisis: the lack of water. With climate change leading to less rainfall in recent years and an increase in population (a growth of over one million, mainly from Eastern Europe in the 1990s), the country has been growing increasingly thirsty. Development of existing aquifers has met with limited success so the authorities have turned to desalination to solve their water needs. A plant opened at Ashdod in 2006 with supply five percent of the country’s needs and more are planned. Desalination has long been used in the Arabian Gulf, where the energy required for this process has not been an issue. The same cannot be said in Israel. As the old joke goes, Moses may have led the chosen people to the land of milk and honey but it seems to be only place in the Middle East without oil. Israel is already dependent on Egyptian gas supplies and are willing to do anything to avoid becoming even more dependent on a neighbour which is still viewed as a potential enemy.

If the hopes for this discover are realised, the Tamar project may be just what Israel needs: a large supply of energy, independent of Arabic sources.

In the meantime, the people of Gaza are still dying. Expect the number of sorties to increase right up to the ceasefire being signed because there is a lot at stake. But the Tamar gas project may not just benefit Israelis but may supply what all the people of the region need: a little respite.

Let us all hope the time is used searching for a long-term peace, and not just another ceasefire.



Selected sources:

Tamar gas projecthttp://www.export.gov.il/Eng/_Articles/Article.asp?CategoryID=391&ArticleID=10137
Waterhttp://www.water-technology.net/projects/israel/
www.waterwebster.com/documents/desalinationreportjune2007.pdf (page 28 - Israel)
Gaza gashttp://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0901/S00101.htm

Traveling Back

From the East, flights to London always seem to demand getting up at ungodly hours.  Flying from Israel is no exception, even when the airplane’s departure time is a not unreasonable 07:30. 

My alarm had been set for 02:30 but as it happened I was awake way before that.  Working offshore without a back-to-back means one has to be ready to work when they need you.  A couple of nights previously I had started my surveying at midnight so my sleep patterns, having to switch on demand from day to night and back again, do get messed up.

The taxi was ready at 03:00hrs outside my hotel.  The night receptionist had kindly made me a cup of hot instant coffee, which I carried into the leather-upholstered Mercedes cab.  A good job it was, as I managed to spill some of it onto the front seat.  Not a good start but many apologies and the use of a ‘wetwipe’ later, we were off.

I didn’t get the name of my driver but like all those on contract to the oil company, he is from Ashdod in the south of Israel.  He had already had a two-hour drive up to Haifa but at least Ben Gurion Airport, just outside Tel Aviv, was en-route back home. 

The radio was tuned into a late night phone-in show to which the driver was listening intently.  Being in Hebrew, I had no idea as to content, so I asked him what the topic was.

“It’s about Gaza,” he replied.  “It’s people phoning in from all over the world.”

“What are they saying?”

“It is messages of support.  Prayers for the safety of our kids who are fighting and hope that the rocket attacks are stopped.”

“What do you think of the attack on Gaza?” 

There was a silence for a while.  I thought that he would not reply but then an answer came.

“I live in Ashdod with my family.  I have four children, the eldest of which is eleven.  Three boys and a girl.  Ashdod and the other towns have been closed for business in the past week. No schools, nothing.  Nobody goes outside because of the rockets.  My wife says to me tonight “Don’t go!  Stay inside where it is safe.”  But I have to work.”

I agreed with him that life has to continue but didn’t he think that it was heavy-handed for the IDF to be killing so many when Israeli casualties had been so low?  At that point in time, four Israeli deaths had been reported.  Of course, that was four deaths too many.

“Yes, but you have to understand we have been getting rockets every day, every day for the past six or seven years.  Our argument is not with the Palestinian people but it is with Hamas.  They hate us and it has been worse when they came to power.  What else can we do?”

This fatalism by the Israeli people seems to be the attitude of pretty much every Jewish person I spoke to on the subject.  The new bout of blood-letting seems to be accepted as part of the cycle of things.  “What else can we do?” is the usual reply from pretty much every Israeli I have heard voice an opinion on the topic.

I have been wondering about this attitude of acceptance.  On the Friday night before travelling I had met a couple of guys in the Bear Bar in Haifa, Anwar and Carmel.  Really nice lads; age-wise probably in their late twenties, maybe early thirties. Anwar had been a commander in the IDF for five years.  But as their names may suggest, they are not Jewish, rather they come from the local community of Druze Christians.  In childhood they had not been sold any dream of ‘a little piece of land for our own.’  But I am certain that if they had still been in the military, they would have played their required part in Operation Cast Lead.

It seems to me that it is their time in military service of the state that unites the people of Israel, regardless of ethnic or religious background.  Those three years (minimum) does more than anything else instil a sense of nationhood and solidarity.  It also allows individuals in Israel to look on at the suffering of their closest neighbour with detachment because these people do not have that shared experience.  They are in effect, “other.  Not one of us.”  After all, that is exactly what military training sets out to achieve.  I cannot see what else it can be because otherwise the Israeli people are warm, friendly and so hospitable.

The killing in Gaza has been continuing all week now.  Since the friendly-fire incident of a few days ago, I have not heard any news of further Israeli casualties.  Really that is a good thing.  But I so wish I could say the same about casualties and suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza.  The Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ron Proser, was on the Today Programme (BBC Radio 4) this morning, defending the IDF’s attack on the UN school which killed sixty and injured many more.  He made the claim that several days prior to the attack, Hamas had used the school compound as a site for mortar battery.

Meanwhile, in this morning’s Independent, Robert Fisk has written these lines

“And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.”

At least the BBC presenter on Today had the gumption to question the ambassador on who had really broken the cease-fire.  But really even that is missing the point.  The real question should have been “why was there a siege around Gaza to begin with?”  Let me offer a possible answer.  In recent history a blockade has been used to “soften up” a country or territory prior to war being waged against it.  Iraq is the best example of this.  So, with this in mind, it can be presumed that eighteen months ago, Israel knew that they were going to attack Hamas in Gaza at some point in the future.  The ceasefire of the past summer held reasonably well; at least the rocket attacks upon the southern towns were much reduced.  It was only following the two Israeli attacks in November (killing ten Palestinians) that the vast majority of the three hundred or so rockets were fired before the cease-fire was officially ended.

There is an election due soon in Israel.  Before Operation Cast Lead, the ruling coalition looked set for defeat.  Now the polls show that they have a fighting chance of being re-elected.

There is nothing more cynical than politicians laying down the lives of people simply to win an election. 

Cited report:

Robert Fisk in the Independent newspaper, 7^th. of January 2009.http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-do-they-hate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html

The Dark Divide

Viewed from the sea, the border between Israel and Gaza is a subtle affair; quite unlike the Israel Lebanon border where the no-man’s-land snakes over the hillsides in a broad stripe before dwindling into the distant east. Gaza from the sea looks just like another city which can be seen dotting the coast of the Mediterranean at regular intervals. True, maybe more high-rise towers, more densely packed than it near neighbours but nothing to especially draw the eye.

That is during the day. At night the scene is completely changed. While the coastal towns of Israel are shining with light, there is no sign of the city of Gaza. A passing ship may see the occasional headlamps of a car and imagine that one or two small villages and scattered homesteads occupy the land south of Ashdod. The tower blocks, the buildings, the streets; all become invisible. It is as if Gaza never was. The only clue that there is a border at all is a negative one: a strip of utter darkness that lies between the citizens of Israel and their near Palestinian neighbours.

That is the closest I have been to Gaza and although the view I describe is now several years old, I am certain that it has not changed. Indeed, from what I hear in the media it is worse now for the population of Gaza than it was then. The two-state “solution” that arose from the peace initiatives of the 1990s are now dead. Former US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, stated as much this week. Now, I am not in the habit of agreeing with Mr. Bolton on many topics but in this I’m sure he is right. I do not, however, agree with his proposed solution: to carve up the remaining Palestinian populations between existing states, with Gaza going to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan. I’m sure that the Israeli government would be more than happy with this; after all it has long being the policy of Israel to drive the Palestinians off the land claimed by Israelis and let the neighbouring states cope with the refugees should they choose to.

There are several objections to the Bolton suggestion. The first is the right to self-determination. These people are neither Egyptian nor Jordanian. They are Palestinian and I doubt that Palestinians of Gaza would be queuing up to join the repressive police-state that is Egypt. Secondly it assumes that Israel’s neighbours can swallow large numbers of new population, especially people that have been brutalised for many years. Egypt might be able to cope but I doubt that Jordan could. There are already hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees living in poverty in the country. Jordan has already closed its border to more. Maybe the assumption is that these people will be able to return home one day. Looking at the long-lived refugee camps of Palestinians in Lebanon, I have my doubts. Iraq has been trashed for a generation and those who have already left will not be returning soon. To bequeath another population on a fragile Jordan may well tip the balance for the country with the resulting in failed states running across the Middle East all the way from Israel’s eastern border to the western border of Iran, a truly horrific prospect.

It is perhaps time for Israelis to consider that which their policies have long attempted to avoid: what will happen if the Jewish people become minorities in their own state? For the citizens of Israeli, Gaza and the West Bank to live in one country and with equal rights under the law. Unrealistic and infeasible? At the moment, yes it is. Against the Zionist dream of a Jewish state? Yes. Would the majority of Palestinians have to renounce their claims on the land they have been driven from? Yes. Will the Jewish religion have to be granted special rights in the constitution of the new state of Israel-Palestine? Yes, that too. There would have to be much work to be done to bring this notion about and it would take time: a lot of time. Probably another forty years. It is not impossible though. Things have happened in my lifetime I never thought would happen: the fall of the Iron Curtain; Sinn Fein and the DUP in Northern Ireland working together in government. I know that these conflicts are not the same as Israel and Palestine. The point is that all conflicts have an end and despite the rhetoric on both sides, peace is seldom enforced by military means.

We all must work to break down the darkness that separates people.