i am an idf soldier. i served during the incursions into deheishe a few weeks ago. this is a letter i wrote to my mom when i got back. support resistance to israel.
Good morning mom.
Don’t be ashamed for my behavior.
I’m feeling very sick, I have the impression
I’m becoming like a beast.
I can’t believe what I’m doing.
I obey orders so I don’t look like a sissy in front of my friends.
You could never understand what it means to enter a house
with ten children inside, woman and old people,
pointing the rifle on them, shouting, “freeze!” in Arabic.
Only a few months ago I was going to school,
a nice sweet boy, now I’m an assassin.
My officer orders me to take the kitchen;
I throw on the floor pans, flour sacks, sugar,
to check if they are hiding guns, or bombs.
The noise of things falling makes me throw up.
A small child in the corner looks at me with eyes full of hate.
I know that I would hate Israeli soldiers all my life if I were in his shoes.
I would kill them if I saw my mother (I mean you) forced on the floor,
with your face on the carpet, shaking of fear while soldiers storm in the house.
I’ll refuse to do it next time they ask me to do it.
I’ll go to jail.
Don’t be ashamed mom.
I’m missing dad a lot, he would have told me what to do.
I know that in open combat I could give my life.
But I can’t kick down shelfs, break down walls, and force old people on the floor.
It makes me feel like puke.
I hate myself.
I’m not myself anymore.
I talked with two of my friends that feel the same way.
An old woman was spitting in the face of one of them.
Later he cried in his sleeping bag.
Only I heard him sobbing like a baby.
I can defend myself; don’t worry.
I see too many cigarette butts in your ashtray.
I’m probably the cause of so much smoking.
Hug Yael for me; tell her I’m sorry
I couldn’t say bye before leaving.
I wonder how she would feel if soldiers break into her room
messing up everything and pushing her down on the floor.
Well, I’m finished
If I’ll refuse to obey orders and get arrested will you understand me, mom?
Letter from a young Israeli soldier
---------------------------------------------
8]
THE DYING SYNAGOGUE by Thomas McCarthy
AT SOUTH TERRACE
Chocolate-coloured paint and the July sun
like a blow-torch peeling off
the last efforts of love.
More than time has abandoned this,
God's abandonment, God's synagogue,
that rose out of the ocean
one hundred years from here.
The peeling paint is an emmigrant's
guide to America - lost on the shore
at Cobh, to be torn and scored
by a city of luftmenshn;
Catholics, equally poor, equally driven.
To have been through everything,
to have suffered everything and left
a peeling door. Yahweh is everywhere,
wherever abandonment is needed -
a crow rising after an accident,
wearing the grey uniform
of a bird of carrion, a badger
waiting for the bones of life
to crack before letting go:
wishing the tenth cantor to die,
the Synagogue to become a damp wall,
the wailing mouths to fester.
Too small. To be a small people
aligned to nothing is to suffer blame
like a thief in the night. An activist
threw a petrol-bomb for Palestine:
the sky opened and rained hail
like snow-drops. Flowers for memory,
petrol for the far-away.
To name one's land is to be a cuckoo
pushing others, bird-like, into a pit:
until, at the end, every sacred gesture
becomes vain, soiling the Synagogue
door like the charcoal corpses
at Mauthausen Station, 1944. A few
survived in the green valley of know-
nothing: spent themselves putting boots
on the Catholic poor, counting the brown
pennies, the corncrakes on their
trade routes, and the guerilla raids.
To sit here now, in the rancid sunshine
of low tide, is to contemplate
all of the unnoticed work of love -
exquisite children fall like jewels
from an exhausted colporteur's bag:
a mid-century daughter practises piano,
an etude to forget terror; a brother
dreams of the artistic life, another
shall practise law and become, in time,
the Catholic's tall Lord Mayor.
Where these jewels fall beside the peeling
door, let us place the six lilies of memory;
the six wounds of David's peeling star.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
9]
ON: Simple Living
Life In The Woods
By Henry David Thoreau
Walden: Or, Life In The Woods by Henry David Thoreau.
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a simple cabin on the shores of Walden Pond outside of Concord, Massachusetts beginning the most famous experiment in simple living in American history. The product of his two-year stay there was a volume of classic essays -- one of the great books of American letters and a masterpiece of reflective philosophizing. Accounts of his daily life are interwoven with musings on the virtues of self-reliance and individual freedom, on society, government, and other topics -- all expressed with wisdom and remarkable style.
...........................................................................
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BE AN ACTIVIST 
"Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man." --Mohandas K. Gandhi on nonviolence
Your life is short, and your life is slipping out of your fingers.
Each moment you are less, each day you are less, and each day you are less alive and more dead!
Each birthday is a death day: one more year is gone from your hands.
Be a little more intelligent.
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