The original Spanish-version of this article was published in equinoXio

On a quite balanced -in my opinion- column (well, balanced for the American regular columnist standards), named In Lebanon, Echoes of Iraq?, Nicholas D. Kristof says:

Israelis are brimming with moral clarity, as we Americans were after 9/11. And they’re right: the Hezbollah attacks on Israel were particularly contemptible because they followed Israeli withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza. Israel should have been rewarded for those withdrawals, not subjected to rocket attacks and cross-border incursions.

These and other are the reasons because some Israelis (and pro-Jewish) justify such dreadful crimes as this Sunday’s massacre in Qana, where 34 children and 10 women died under the bombs sent by Ehud Olmert’s government, who’s earning enough merits to exceed Ariel Sharon’s bloody legacy. Had Israel the right to self-defence? Of course it had, and I agree with Kristof in that it deserved to be rewarded for the Gaza and South Lebanon withdrawals as an action for peace. Nevertheless, one should ask if the kidnappings of several soldiers by the Hamas and Hezbollah murderers and terrorists justify the deaths of hundreds of civilians in Lebanon, including a lot of foreigners? Wasn’t it an overreaction? Here Kristof strikes again when he states that "the first rule in foreign policy, as in medicine, should be “Do no harm.”" Such a wise quote. Even Americans, Israel allies, feel in a terribly uncomfortable position. The same applies for some people who self proclaim "leftist" and, because of a simple coincidence in their hate for US, condemn Israel but doesn’t do the same with Hamas and Hezbollah killers. The angry reactions of Spanish right-wing and, of course, from Israeli ambassador in Madrid are justified.

For centuries, specially during the last 58 years, after the founding of the State of Israel, Arabs and Israelis have promoted the hate for each other. This feeling, based in the fact that both people seem to "not to fit" in the same territory, the resentment of some Israelis after the Nazi Holocaust, and the Palestinian claims, have unleashed several conflicts within that time, whose results generate deep-seated grudges between these people with ancestral roots in this fertile region (once with vegetation, today with oil). Those feelings get worse because of the Israel-US alliance and the rising and consolidation of the Islamist extremist armed groups, which put hate and religion together in order to kill, justify themselves and gain popularity, as well as the support that certain goverments (as Ahmadinejad’s) provide to these organizations. A spiral of death that will unleash a bigger magnitude conflict for sure.

Everything we’ve seen in the Middle East for the last several years have been blood, death and destruction, result of  such awful emotions as hate, grudge and the wish of revenge. The Israelis and Palestinians’ rights to have their respective states seem not to be able to coexist in the same space and in the same time. It is a phenomenon so complex that its solution seems more distant everyday. Even children are urged to perpetuate these bad feelings and even music cannot escape this arrogant confrontation. Things this way, as long as Arabs (including Palestinians) and Israelis keep promoting the visceral hate for each other, there will be never peace in the Middle East.

Related articles (at equinoXio, in Spanish):

• El deseo ciego de venganza
• Viendo el Líbano desde YouTube, OhmyNews y la FAO