Jerusalem...Holy land or Battlefield?

Riley Rappaport

10A

                Jerusalem: Holy land or Battlefield?

    Keeping peace is much harder than breaking it. Peace is a valuable part of society that people take for granted and therefore, lose stability between them and the people around them. But what makes peace so easy to break? The answer in this situation is religion and land. Jerusalem was a Holy land for the people of Israel when they formed and then they were attacked 1948 by 6 Arab nations. After the Israelis were attacked, in 1967 they surprise attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and won the war in 6 days. Then in 1987 the Palestinians rose up against the Israelis for their independence. There have been conflicts between Israel, Palestine and the surrounding countries many different occasions, an example of this is Intifada 1 and 2. During warfares many bombs were exchanged between Israel and Palestine leaving many citizens dead. Between 1991 and 2003 there have been about 1000 Israeli deaths and 2550 Palestinian deaths. From the beginning of the first Intifada there have been 5500 Israeli deaths and 24000 Palestinian deaths (source). Between these countries, it is extremely hard to communicate with one another because the languages are different so therefore they can agree to peace or settle things rationally.

Religious warfare has created almost 2000 child deaths and its still growing. The cycle between these conflicts is peace that is followed by bloodshed. Conflict has been growing because the constant battle for  the holy land Jerusalem. Children have been living with this warfare their whole life and have been affected, by loss of family and friends since bombs were blowing up in the streets. Children have also been affected by the conflict by turning into child soldiers. In the book The Hour of Sunlight, we get to know Sami Al Jundi, a Palestinian teenager while the Israeli-Palestinian War was occurring. As a child he felt very strongly about the everlasting conflict and believed all of the stereotypes and single stories of the Israeli people. But as he grew older he also grew more passionate about bombs and warfare because of hardships under the Israeli rule, along with his friends. One day he was assembling a bomb with his friends and it went completely wrong. It ended up blowing up, killing one of his friends and put Sami in jail.   “He was right. I knew I would be in prison for many years. This was my life now. The nearly inedible food was an attempt to weaken us physically and psychologically. It would not work on me, I decided. The next morning, I convinced myself that everything on the breakfast tray tasted like it came from my mother’s kitchen. I cleaned my plate” (Al Jundi 104). After ten years in prison Sami decided to take the non-violence tactic to have political change. He traveled all over Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza stip teaching his movement of non-violence. He became a useful source on how a biased person at the beginning can learn from his mistakes and become trustworthy. This goes to show how corrupted people can change into peacemakers. But it also shows how hard it is to keep peace and how easy it is to break it. And when peace is broken, people from both sides die or go to prison.

    So how do we spread awareness about this conflict? One thing we can do to spread awareness is create a partition where student sign it and then give it to the school board. The partition will explain how we need to put this conflict in the curriculum of schools across the board. Another thing that we could do to spread awareness is the media. Although there is already a significant amount of media on this topic, not enough people watch it. But what we can do is create blogs and use online access to the media. Over 500 million people use facebook and 50% of those people log on everyday. If there becomes more awareness about the conflict on facebook, 1 in every 12 people will know about it.