In addition to my litany of character flaws, I do have a couple, maybe three, that are redemptive . . . at least in my eyes. The first is that I feel things deeply. I clearly remember my mother saying to me when I was seven, “You’re not like other children. You feel things intensely.” Maybe in our American society, that is not a positive manly trait. I did feel more comfortable living in an Arab culture, where men do show emotions freely. The peri-Mediterranean world is that way, the Italians, Greeks, and Arabs . . . and maybe the Spainish. Northern Europe, on the other hand, culturally passed through the bottleneck of the Victorian age, where pretentious Christianity was the rage including the dumb notion that emotions were not of God. Historians have called that period “The Cult of Respectability.” A long list of emotional words was created then as “swear words,” which you could not say. It is no coincidence that soon after the oppression of normal human emotions by the spiritual elite, the Westly brothers started having “spiritual experiences” that certainly looked like the same old emotions, but with a more holy label. But I digress.

But joined with my deep feelings is a profound sense of empathy. I cry watching movies. I cried often with my patients, often waking up at night thinking of them. My empathy makes me a spoiler of pets, children, and grandchildren. The feelings are even worse now . . . or better (depending on your perspective) since I’ve been sick.

When I watch wars play out on TV and mass shootings, I feel it in my gut. It drifts through my nocturnal thoughts as ghosts as I’m trying to sleep. There is no political bias to my empathy. I felt the pain of the Jewish people with the murder of the innocents. I feel it now when I see the limp bodies of Gazan children stacked like cords of wood, wrapped in their bloodied-white kaffans, American bullets and shrapnel in their bones. I paid for that metal. I feel it when I imagine the good people of Maine having a fun night in a bowling alley that ends with bullets tearing through their skulls. How fair is that? How unfair for those who loved them. Innocents. Are the Gazan children Hamas? I don’t think so. Were the Jewish music festival goers responsible for the plight of the Palestinian people? Not really. Were the bowlers the ones who jilted the love of a madman, unleashing his rage? Nope. I seek factual truth at all cost because lies, lies we tell ourselves and others, is the true root of all evil.

It doesn’t help matters that I’ve worked in a war zone, seeing the suffering firsthand (Soviet-Afghan conflict 1981). It gives color to my imagination when I’ve worked in an earthquake relief zone (Pakistan 2006) where 83,000 perished. I’ve smelled the smell of rotten human flesh, a school of 500 girls collapsed upon them like a pile of pancakes. But now this current suffering is hand-hewn. Intentional, not an act of nature. How evil. The children of God murdering the children of God. Strangely, religion is one of the greatest impetuses for war and killing.

My imagination is my second positive trait, so it seems. My mother also worried about me as a child because I lived in imaginary worlds so intensely that I couldn’t re-surface into reality easily. She was afraid I would get stuck there. I lived in Yemen for two years, in my mind, while writing The Stones of Yemen. That imaginary world saved my life as my real life sucked, it was one of a suffering hermit, devoid of social contacts. If I have any talent as a writer, despite my struggle with dyslexia, it is the gift of that imagination. But that imagination also haunts me day and night with the suffering of people I’ve never met. Is this love?

But this is not about me, it is about them. War is the most absurd of human inventions. I also remember when I was a child and the war in Vietnam was raging—my brother preparing to go—I told my mom, “I think war is stupid.” She said, “Well, it is hard to understand when you are a child, but when you grow up you will understand war better.”

Am I not grown up now? I’m in my late sixties. War is still stupid to me. There are no grand reasons, only emotions set free to destruction. A man like Putin, turning seventy and feeling his own mortality, murders a country in cold blood with the hopes of leaving a legacy for himself. A statue or a plaque. Ridiculous! Stick that bronze up his ass!

I won’t even try to address the situation in Israel as it is complex, but still absurd. The Jewish people wanting a homeland. The world—rightly so—feeling deep compassion for them after the atrocities they experienced under the Nazis. Then making a careless decision, but motivated by empathy, supporting them in a take-over of Palestine, pushing out people who had lived there for almost 2,000 years. As they say, hurt people, hurt people. Since then, the non-Arab world looking the other way while injustice flourishes. Then, to hide from our support of these injustices, we make up a narrative that the Muslims or Arabs in general are born terrorists. Isn’t that the definition of racism? Defining a class of people by our convenient stereotypes? The American evangelical community is the worst, justifying the injustice via flimsy dogmas invented by a British preacher in 1850s named Darby, while their Bible is clear that the only thing God requires of them is justice and humility. I don’t think they’ve ever met the historical Jesus, a Palestinian Jew who loved the Arab.

Nope, I’m not justifying the cruelty of Hamas. Justice for the perpetrators is death. But I’m saying that the suffering must end, and only real justice can bring peace to both the Jews and the Arabs. The present system isn’t working.

Albert Einstein is one of my heroes. While asserting that there is no God (although at times he sounds like an agnostic rather than an atheist) he could see God’s creation, the cosmos, with more clarity than the rest of us mere mortals. E=MC² was one of God’s best-kept secrets. I am reading a collection of his letters in a book titled, The World As I See it, most letters written in the 1930s. He, like me, was a passionate pacifist. A smart man. But to my surprise, he was also a Zionist. But he was a different kind of Zionist. He has helped me to see, even before World War II, how the diaspora of Jews longed for cultural homeland. He supported that idea but warned many times that this “homeland” must not be a political entity, but a cultural one, a place where Jews live in harmony with their Arab brothers (both born from the seed of Abraham). He warned that if the Arabs are displaced in a cruel wary, without respect and justice, it would destroy the true Zionist’s notion and violence would commence.

Pray for Peace