A pause is not a ceasefire

This afternoon I set out on foot with no destination in mind, and I ended up downtown. 

I found some unusually literate graffiti and thought I had bagged my blip (Extra, and the full poem is Emily Dickinson's), so when it started raining, I decided to catch a streetcar home. Waiting, I saw and eavesdropped on the two young men in my main. They seem to be musicians, the one on the right leaning on a hard plastic case shaped like a guitar, the other lugging a black case about the size of a trombone. The one on the left was holding up his phone for the one on the right to see. 

“You see the Al Jazeera report…” he was saying. An ambulance passed and blotted out their conversation. Then the one on the right said, “But those are Hamas numbers. Do you think they’re credible?”

We all boarded the streetcar together and I heard behind me a woman shouting with agitation, “How can Jewish people, who know what oppression is….” It seems everyone everywhere is aware of the devastation of Gaza. The whole world is watching in horror.

This morning a member of the Portland Buddhist Peace Fellowship sent us an eighteen-minute video called Britain in Palestine. The video was created by the Balfour Project, an organization started by a Scottish couple, Roger and Monica Spooner, who think the problems of Palestine and Israel are the fault of British men of great privilege who made conflicting promises to Arabs and Jews about the area now known as Israel and Palestine. Then the British left, taking no responsibility for the suffering they left behind. I had been dimly aware of that history, but the video makes it clear.