We don’t learn from history.  We don’t even recognize when it is repeating.  And history DOES repeat.  Fights over resources, power, pride and riches with leaders sacrificing innocents and non-innocents alike in their quests. Sound familiar?  Day in, day out.  Year in, year out.  Generations on end.  Millennia.

But for me today is an especially sad day in this scary, violent world. 

Israel has been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Israel’s rise to nationhood came out of the Shoah, the most infamous atrocity in modern history.  (The Shoah is more infamous but no more tragic than the slaughter of Armenians, Bosnians and Croats, Rwandans, Sudanese in Darfur, to name a few.) 

In my lifetime, the grandchildren of oppressed stand accused of being oppressors.  Three generations sandwiched by two atrocities, one documented and the other alleged.  That is also a lesson from history — that the oppressed can easily become oppressors when given the opportunity.

Some of my relatives (all of whom have died) were survivors of the Shoah and the atrocities of Eastern Europe in the early 1900s.   For them, Israel was a realization of dreams and hopes.  

But evil knows no boundaries and respects no borders.  And there have been generations within which to forget the lessons of history.

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UNITED NATIONS – A U.N. investigation concluded Tuesday that both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, raising the prospect that officials may seek prosecution in the International Criminal Court.

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