“If Only There Was No War”

About the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, I read a lot of materials from both sides, probably a whole library. The exile symbol was the massacre in Deir Yassin, and I think that Israeli nationalists then greatly damaged something in the basis of the idea, the dream of re-establishing Israel.

As for the idea itself, I treat it with respect and sympathy. I met the first Israeli in my life a day or two after the 1988 earthquake in Armenia. He, like me, tried to get on the plane to take part in the rescue efforts. We ended up in the same group, and he didn’t seem to speak Russian at all, let alone Armenian. A red-haired guy with a kind face who understood everything without words. We never got to Armenia then — we were told that there would be enough people without us.

Before my eyes is a girl with broken legs in a pickup truck — Shani Nicole Louk. Tattoos are visible on her legs, by which her relatives identified her. It looks like she’s dead, I pray to God that she’s not. A German citizen who came to the peace festival in the town of Reim. A beautiful, long-legged girl, it seems to me that this enraged the attackers. None of them will ever have one like her.

The number of killed festival participants, mostly young people, exceeded 300 people, but that’s not all — many were kidnapped, including Russian Olga Pilnik; how many of them are still alive is unknown. This was a deliberate attack on civilians, among whom were many pacifists and those who sympathized with the Palestinians. The account for Deir Yassin, like all other accounts presented by the Palestinians, is completely closed to me personally. There are my brothers in faith — Palestinian Christians, there is some part of sane Muslims, but these are murderers, sympathizers with murders, and such, I’m afraid, are not a minority; in my eyes they will never again be victims. The murder of hundreds of children at the peace festival, those killed are the same age as me, this is a sacrifice to unclean spirits.

What happened does not relieve the guilt of the Israeli and American military and intelligence officers who raised Hamas in opposition to the left-wing Palestinian organizations, but this topic is not very interesting to me now, everyone obscures the face of Shani Nicole Louk in the picture where she is still alive, laughing, and her broken, terribly curved legs. The Palestinians have been fed sympathy for too long; I remember how Israeli students were expelled from Europe after every escalation, as if they were somehow to blame, as if the idea of ​​collective responsibility was the norm for Europe. This is also why a whole generation of infantile non-humans has grown up, to whom everyone owes money, but they owe no one.

Human sacrifice is when, with the help of an outstanding atrocity that makes the blood run cold, like the burning of forty-two people in Odessa, the doors of hell are thrown open, and from there come those who will strike and sting, regardless of gender, age, character — the perpetrators and innocent. It has now been brought to the Holy Land, and people will not soon remember justice and mercy. May the Lord have mercy on those who find themselves in the midst of what is happening, and on all of us. The war in Ukraine, the death of Artsakh, now these are links in one chain. People have lost their fear of war. For decades, millions of survivors of the tragedy of World War II repeated: “If only there was no war.” And when they were gone and prayer stopped ascending to God, the war began again.