Where is that feeling of never again?

For the last half-dozen years, I’ve been mentally living in that 1914-1918 world, writing a book about the war that killed some 20 million people, military and civilian, and left large parts of Europe in smoldering ruins. I’ve haunted battlefields and graveyards, asked a Belgian farmer if I could step inside a wartime concrete bunker that now houses his goats, and walked through reconstructed trenches and an underground tunnel which protected Canadian troops moving their ammunition to the front line.

In government archives, I’ve looked at laconic reports by officers who survived battles in which most of their troops died; I’ve listened to recordings of veterans and talked to a man whose labor-activist grandfather was court-martialed because he wrote a letter to the Daily Mail complaining that every British officer was assigned a private servant. In a heartbreakingly beautiful tree-shaded cemetery full of British soldiers mowed down with their commanding officer (as he had predicted they would be) by a single German machine gun on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, I found a comment in the visitors’ book: “Never Again.”

I can’t help but wonder: Where are the public places for mourning the mounting toll of today’s wars? Where is that feeling of never again?

 Adam Hochschild  in Guernica. Here

"Israel cannot get away with it...", asserts Kuldip Nayar

America is the only nation which can put pressure on Israel. But every US president assesses how much he can do without annoying the powerful Jewish lobby in America. President Barack Obama appears to be different but his reaction is lukewarm. He may not prove to be a Bill Clinton who got Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat to shake hands and come to an understanding which had the makings of a settlement.

Obama has to start all over again and emphasise to Israel that peace or security in the region can be achieved through conciliation, not by force. The Security Council’s resolution was too tepid to be taken seriously.

The attack on the flotilla indicates how power has become the arbiter in the world. Countries in a region have to come together to withstand pressure from outside. This is yet another reminder to South Asia that unless it puts its act together, it may expose itself to outside interference. The manner in which the US is enhancing its presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan is ominous. The region must wake up to the danger.

Israel has reintroduced gunboat diplomacy. Colonisation belongs to an age when there was no UN, no forum to discuss aggression and no lobby to seek peace. What has happened recently cannot be taken lightly.

The entire international community has to sit up and take note. Israel cannot get away with it as it has so far by reducing the people of Palestine to a commodity that Tel Aviv can use in the manner it likes.

Israel is not the face of the Jews who are generally known as a peace-loving community. It should not be allowed to blacken their faces.

From Kuldip Nayar's article in Dawn. More Here.