This is a call for people around the world to stop the war in Lebanon and to call upon Israel to abandon its policies of occupation and domination over Palestinians. I am overwhelmed by the actions taken by my country since this war has started. I would like to know why has Israel done such evil to another people. We have just completed 6 years of peace and quite in the north, but we kept Lebanese prisoners in captivity, not willing to return them or to negotiate their release. Why? Did we not know that one day the desire to get them back would make Hezbollah kidnap soldiers? They kept on saying it clear and loud. And when it happened anyway why could we not negotiate their release first before destroying a whole country? for all the bombing we have done we might have killed the kidnapped solders already. I am asking loudly why Israel has the right to kill and destroy and devastate with such brutal force the entire state of Lebanon. Why has no one interfere to stop this bloodshed? The entire northern part of Israel has been under shelling every day, people are also getting killed here in my home town Haifa and many other villages and towns and none of us are able to continue with our life. In spite of this conflict looking so complicated there are few basic things we should remember. the root of it all is the dispute over Palestine. Since the establishment of Israel, the Palestinians have suffered displacement and occupation. They will not surrender their claim to a state of their own. Israel on the other hand denied for a long time the very existence of Palestinians and their national aspirations. Eventually, with the Oslo agreement there was an official recognition in Israel in the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim. Nothing much came out of it. Israel still forbids the creation of a Palestinian state and will not let them have the small piece that was left from the original 1948 Palestine. What has all this to do with Lebanon? The original reason why Israel got itself into Lebanon in the first place in 1982 was to destroy the P.L.O. it failed horrendously but in the mean time created such outrage to its very occupation of southern Lebanon that a new organization was created, the Hezbollah, the one Israel is fighting today. The results of the first war in Lebanon were 18 years of wasted bloodshed with more than 1600 Israeli soldiers dead and hundred of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese dead. Why do it again? If it failed once it surly will fail the next time. All these questions make me think that Israel is fighting for the US and its interests. Perhaps so. But our problem has nothing to do with the US. We have to live here with another nation, namely the Palestinians. Nothing will ever change this fact.

Today, as we, Women against War and all the other peace organizations in Israel, campaigns and demonstrations focus on Lebanon, at exactly the same time, Israeli forces are conquering Gaza again, killing Palestinians in Nablus and Gaza, preventing movement and marriages between Palestinians in different parts of occupied Palestine and inside Israel (20% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinians), separating villages from towns and people from their livelihood and an endless list of miseries. There is no electricity in hospitals in Gaza. No money to run the rubbish collecting cars in the town. Children are sick and malnourished. Why?

Yes, it is true. The Palestinians were not nice to us. They used violence in their struggle. No enemy is "good" or "nice" by the very nature of being an enemy. But peace is possible only between enemies. Friends are already in peace. Thus, for all our Jewish supporters in the US I say, look into history to see who the "terrorist" is, ask him why he has chosen this path. Why even women sometime join him in using force. Only by facing him and her – Palestinians – we would have a chance to survive in this area. Killing each other will end up with all of us dead. I am tired from long days of struggle. Struggle to say "I beg to differ". No one here is allowed a different point of view. In the "only" democracy in the Middle East, if you suggest that perhaps this war is unnecessary, that it is evil, that it should stop immediately, you are called a traitor. People phone the radio stations wanting to kill you (me). If Jews made all these efforts to build a homeland in order to kill and get killed, I am not sure it has anything to do with Judaism at all. I am ashamed in what is happening now and do not know from whom I could ask forgiveness.

With my respect and call for action.

Hannah Safran (Ph.D.)

Haifa, northern Israel