Can you forgive the unforgivable?

 Lots of lies, propaganda and hatred out there about Gaza: 

Much of it coming from Hamas, Iran and the left. I take Israel's part, not because I don't think the Palestinians don't have a point, but because as a people, they have been manipulated by demagogues, do gooders, and people who are busy filling their bank accounts with money supposed to aid ordinary folk.

So what is the answer? 

One answer is the Hiroshima answer: When faced with an implacable enemy who is willing to fight to the death and doesn't care how many innocent civilians are killed as a result (read the estimates of deaths if the US had invaded, based on what happened in Saipan etc.), so knowing this, what do you do?

One is to make war so terrible they might chose peace, i.e the atomic bomb.

The other? The way of forgiveness. 

People cry genocide in Gaza, yet even with the exaggerated civilian casualty numbers (counting soldiers as civilian, using civilians as human shields), yet real genocides that the UN sat back and didn't stop are quickly forgotten.

One example is Rwanda, NPR report from 2019:

It happened 25 years ago - up to 800,000 people in Rwanda killed - mostly from the minority Tutsi community, all of that over the course of just a hundred days.

 Italics mine. 

And no one demonstrated in the streets, the UN peacekeepers withdrew, and the EU and US decided not to intervene.

and unlike Gaza, it was not outsiders, but neighbors who often did the murders. And yes, there were UN peacekeepers there who didn't stop it, and the US and Europe didn't send in special forces to stop the killings: which were often done face to face using machetes.

So what was the aftermath?

Today the hundreds of thousands of people who carried out those killings live among their victims. Journalist and author Philip Gourevitch has witnessed the unique way Rwandans have defined and navigated forgiveness after the massacre, using local courts. But it went beyond justice:...

truth can also be really traumatizing and, in this case, retraumatizing because, to go from the idea that - that person is the killer of my family..

I heard the word forgiveness, I thought it sort of meant you'd restore whatever the relationship was before....And they would say, no, that involves trust. That's a whole different thing. Forgiveness doesn't require trust. Forgiveness simply means letting go of the idea of getting even, forgoing the idea of revenge. Right? Now, even that's a big ask. But it means accepting coexistence.

read the whole thing.

Here is a talk by one survivor on EWTN,  a Catholic network:

 

more here from a secular site.

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