The Big Read: Violence will beget violence

Somewhere in the Gaza Strip, some time not too far in the future, a child remembers. The child remembers that, during Ramadan 2014, bombs rained down from the sky and killed his friends, his relatives, his neighbours.

The child remembers many things. The child remembers, as the New York Times reported that week, that the electricity was cut off, that sewage leaked into the drains, that refugees were packed so densely into houses that there was no space to sleep.

The child remembers that, in that week of the air bombardment, cheered on from some quarters in Israel, an air strike killed three children in their bedroom.

Three more strikes in the afternoon killed another four children. And after 9pm an artillery shell killed eight people in their home, including four children.

The child remembers that, for perhaps a day-and-half that week, the world had woken up and gasped in shock and horror after four young boys - members of the same family - were killed by Israeli warships when they were playing football on the beach. It was about 4pm. It was a sunny day. The sky was bright blue. They were aged between nine and 11. The child remembers and wonders if that is what the boys saw before they died. A bright blue sky, a noise, and then nothing.

The deaths occurred just days after the final of the soccer World Cup. The boy remembers that he liked soccer, once, a long time ago. Before the bombs came raining down.

The child remembers that the bombs came raining down because three Israeli teenagers had been abducted and murdered.

Their murderers were not known. Not found. The child remembers that because the murderers were not found the people of Palestine were all deemed guilty. That is why the bombs came falling down on children, women, civilians.

These memories are written on the mind of the child. Perhaps on his body, too, because many were injured during the Ramadan of 2014. The child remembers that children were injured when a hospital was bombed, that children were bombed as they fled other parts of the Gaza Strip.

It is with these memories that the child, in the year 2020, or 2025, stands ready to join the war to destroy the state of Israel. The child girds his loins, joins the fray. The architects of the horrors of 2014, when the state of Israel gouged out 342 pairs of Palestinian eyes after suffering the gouging of three pairs of eyes, have achieved all they sought to achieve. This is war. It is war without end. It is an eye for an eye, a body bag for another body bag.

If there are any winners in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are these men of war. For, waiting for the Palestinian child on the other side of the conflict is another child. He is 18. He is Israeli. He, too, is now ready to kill and perpetuate a conflict that has raged for decades. This child has been told that everyone on the other side wants to kill and annihilate him and his kinsmen.

He has grown with these voices telling him this. So he follows their instructions. He is ready to kill the child on the other side.

The warmongers of 2014 are the winners here. They have stoked a war without end.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is worse than that. It is the world's failure to uphold the principle that what is good enough for us is good enough for others. At the heart of the murderous assault on Gaza is the fact that generalised vengeance by Israel is being tolerated because three innocent Israeli children were murdered.

Were they killed by the 78 children whom the UN children's agency (Unicef) tells us have died in the past two weeks of Israeli bombardment?

What happened to those boys on the beach this week, who were bombed in full view of the world's media, should awaken every leader to the fact that the Israeli policy of flushing out Hamas militants is wrong and is killing innocent people. The only way it can be viewed is to acknowledge that Israel regards every Palestinian, every child and civilian, as a potential terrorist. It means the state wants to annihilate them.

Good men and women across the world now need to speak up for an end to this madness. There are no winners here. The world will reap an endless cycle of violence if it does not stop it now.

In five years, in 10 years, the same young people who today are fleeing their homes on donkeys in the Gaza Strip will remember.

Others across the world will also remember. They will remember the gift bequeathed to them by those who stay silent today.

That gift is war without end and it will eat up not just Israelis and Palestinians, but all of us.