Peace on Earth?

By Peter Finlay. Featured image shows a recent scene of bombing in Gaza.

I am going to go back to my little robin – the one I wrote about in April. He came to me then to help me heal from a kind of personal assault I had experienced. He came again a few days ago for no apparent reason. However it started me thinking about a far more important assault than anything I might have experienced, the assault that has been taking up so much of our news.

We have seen far too much violence in our world these last days with its focus principally on the Middle East. Sadly, in early October, it was the very Israelis who had been doing the most to try to heal the injustices that had been perpetrated against the people of Palestine for far too long who were among the victims that day. The reaction of the Israeli government has been, as we have seen daily, the unending destruction of Palestinian homes, lives and families in Gaza. So many children murdered by the almost irresistible power of a state military machine with the backing of governments in the world that choose not to think too much about the realities of the whole situation. Young lives ended in horrendous circumstances and many more, not killed, but permanently scarred, if not physically certainly in their young minds.

Many of us find it so unbearable that we cannot stop our eyes filling with tears. I have experienced that for both sides in this conflict. Then the other day, a very strange and very ugly video, ironically titled ‘The Friendship Song’, was posted by an Israeli national broadcaster, ‘Kan News’. (They took it down fast after a horrified worldwide reaction but it is still viewable on a few sites). It shows a group of 6 young schoolgirls singing. Singing about how we will annihilate everyone in Gaza. In a year there will be no one left. Their little faces singing war songs with a backdrop in the video of warplanes on the hunt, swooping from the skies, buildings crumbling with the dreadful dust clouds billowing above them, Palestinian homes left in smithereens, assault troops from helicopters descending on ropes to finish off any remaining life. The utmost violence imaginable.

That same evening on TV I saw a programme where young Ugandan children were singing. It was so good to see! They sang with huge joy and with bright lively eyes and laughing smiles and a real love of life. No one was manipulating them. The contrast could not have been greater.

My robin appeared a few days ago from nowhere as I was beside our woodshed, slowly picking out a number of small kindling sticks for our stove. Suddenly he was perched beside me on one of the sticks and he could not have been nearer to me. Only inches. All the time he was flitting from one stick in the shed to another. So close. All the time he was looking at me from his bright little eye, not out of any wariness but as if he was communicating to me, as if he was saying something that contrasted his world to the dreadful world of human stupidity, violence and hatred. He seemed to share that world and not the other brutal world that we see far too much of daily.

As I write (24 November), a pause in the terror has just begun. However it is not a cease fire. We are told the brutal bombing of women and children will start all over again after only a few days. Several more extensions of the ‘truce’ have followed. And now (30 November) there has been another extension: another day maybe? But the horrible uncertainty seems set to continue. Outside commentators in Gaza speak of the tired drained faces of children, full of terror and fear. Innocent children. What kind of monstrous cruelty can even think of re-starting it all over again and perpetrating more terror on these little souls?

December is surely the perfect time for robins. They feature frequently on our Christmas cards reminding us of the message of Peace and Goodwill to Mankind. Was there ever more need of that message than now? That Message of Peace and Reconciliation that the world has so sadly and disastrously turned its back on?

Merry Christmas from a merry little robin redbreast! And a very special peace and love to the children of Gaza.