My 16 year old cousin lives on a West Bank settlement, and last Friday she sent me an email about an incident near her school. It shocked me. I haven't been in contact with her since before the intifada, but then she was moderately right-wing, certainly she would not have said things like the last line. Here are excerpts from the email, with my translations in square brackets:

"do you know what they found today next to my school??? of course you dont... a MECHABEL [terrorist]!!!! he poked [I think she means 'stabbed'] only one man and then the army killed him. i like the army. army gooooooooood. [...] anyway, they killed the mechabel and i saw the dead body on the floor with blood gushing out of his head onto his arm and his brain (i'm surprised he had one...) was on the other side of the road. it was great. i wish i could see evry day a dead arab. "

I want to tell her that not every arab is a terrorist, and that they feel that she has stolen their land, and that they are fighting for it back. I want to tell her that an attitude of 'every day a dead arab' is sick and bloodthirsty and that she should look at what she has become. I want to tell her that killing terrorists doesn't solve the problem, it puts it off, and that there are more terrorists because of the way we are dealing with the problem. Thing is, I can't, because I am sitting here in England, I haven't lived in Israel for two years, and I know she would just turn around (metaphorically) and say, You don't understand anything. You are too far away. And maybe she is right about that.

Thing is, the exact same thing could be said by a Palestinian teenager embarking on a shahid mission. He would say 'I wish I could see every day a dead Israeli'. He would say, 'I like Fatah. Fatah goooood.' If anyone came to him and said that his murder would not help anything, that he wasn't serving his people, that he was propogating a senseless cycle of violence, that he could never justify what he was doing because when you take out the politics he was simply slaughtering children, he could turn around to you and say, You just don't understand. You are too far away.

Maybe he is also right

I think that when you are so deep in a situation it is impossible to think rationally or objectively about it, because you are the subject. And I don't think you would allow anybody else from the outside to penetrate your self-made fantasies about right and wrong because they are on totally different wavelengths. That's what I think, but I am probably wrong, in which case, what do I write back to my cousin? What can I say to her?

I would really appreciate sensible thoughts. senseless streams of 'PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!!' are really not appreciated.