Gaza!

"Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal."

There is nothing I can say that your heart isn’t telling you right now, if you’re only willing to listen.

Yazan, a malnourished 2-year-old Palestinian boy, in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City. Photograph: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian

I’m not here to change anyone’s mind.

I’m here to love everybody and tell the truth.

The truth is that we, as a society, as a civilisation, are doing this to each other, to our children.

The truth is that we are quite good at separating who will get to choose their favourite ice cream today and who will starve to death. The truth is that we think it’s normal.

The truth is that we’re willing to tolerate genocide and ethnic cleansing streamed live on social media. We means you, I and most people you and I personally know. The truth is that we’re trying to pretend we’ll be able to ignore it and forget it.

The truth is that we’re pretending it’s somehow not our problem because this is done with someone else’s hands.

The truth is that we, as western society that’s implicitly and explicitly allowing this to happen, are deranged. We’re as deranged as those fine guys that Jesus had in mind when He said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’

The truth is that we don’t know what we’re doing. We truly don’t.

A one-and-a-half-year-old child in Gaza facing life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images via The Guardian

The truth is that I don’t know what I can do to help, let alone stop it. Every morning in my zen dojo, we chant a Bodhisattva vow in Japanese at the end of the meditation session. The vow is to save all beings from suffering, even though they are innumerable and the suffering is endless. An impossible task.

How?

By keeping our hearts open, staying forever brokenhearted without any hope, and doing what we can where we can. I don’t need to give you ideas: your heart knows what to do if only you’re willing to keep it open.

Whatever the way forward, it has to come from a place of love. “Even for Netanyahu?” — asked a friend of mine the other day. Yes, no exceptions.

Making exceptions about who’s worthy of love is how we’ve got into this mess in the first place. I don’t mean just Gaza, but the climate crisis, rampant inequality, racism, destroyed biosphere, every single war, animal suffering on a truly industrial scale… the whole bloody mess.

But when you feel love, real love, you realise that it can’t possibly discriminate at all, no more than gravity can discriminate between objects. Love doesn’t choose or wait until someone is worthy of it. It’s beyond all of that; beyond the ideas of right and wrong, beyond you and me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please trust me and take me literally.

So whatever the way forward, whatever you choose to do in your creative, imaginative way as you allow your heart to stay open and tender in face of unbearable pain, do it from a place of love for everybody: starving children in Gaza, hostages of Hamas, killed IDF soldiers and their families and even Netanyahu.

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.

Dhammapada