Musings about the world

Yesterday, I heard two very familiar news stories. The first came from Gaza. I heard the anguish coming from the Palestinian people living there mourning over their recent dead; causalities of the latest Israeli incursion, itself a response from missiles fired into Israel from Gaza. A Palestinian father described how his little boy was killed in an Israeli attack. He spoke of his sadness and his rage. Then there were the Israeli's also speaking of their one dead, of the untrustworthiness of the Arabs. Then today I read about the slaughter of 8 Orthodox students in Jerusalem by a Palestinian gunman. I heard the awful cries from their funeral today. I heard the rage...in other words, I heard the endless repetition of a very old story.
I wondered how many people regret that the United Nations approved the location of the State of Israel in the heart of the Arab world. I often thought how much better it might have been were Israel placed somewhere in Germany. Maybe that would have been worse, but that's hard to imagine.
Also, I thought, as a person born and raised a Jew, how the media seems to favor the Palestinians and the Israelis were as much a victim in all of this. I thought about the endlessness of the violence, how it leads to only more violence, both peoples plunged into fear and sadness.
This is the way of the world. It is.
It is also the way of division, where people place their cultural identities before their shared humanity. This seems pretty to us, the safe bystanders in all of this. How much different would it be were your cultural, religious, national, other bullshit identity were savaged by the "other"? How different might that feel?