folio

I bumped into an old friend yesterday. Though we live in the same town, just down the road from one another, it was like a great reunion. He seized this opportunity like we were long-lost friends.

But as he went on to talk at me about Palestine for nearly ten minutes without pause, I realised he was one caught inside a filter bubble.

Had he given me room to interject, I would have challenged his sweeping generalisations. There are plenty of good people raising their voice on this tragic situation, I would have said.

The nearest I could come to offering perspective was to point out that just as he considered media reporting biased and one-sided, rabid supporters of Israel complain about the exact same thing.

That’s the problem with spending too much time in echo chambers. You end up in a polarised realm in which the world is divided into us and them. Your people on one side, everyone else on the other.

It was probably a good thing that I couldn’t get a word in edgeways then, lest it be noted that I don’t follow the party line, absorbing pious propaganda by osmosis.

Who now allows themselves to recall the 15,000 civilians killed in the airstrikes on civilian targets carried out by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen?

Yet another humanitarian crisis in an impoverished nation, in which four million have been displaced, driven to destitution by war, disease and man-made famine.

Who dares raise their voice for these victims of catastrophe? Where the worldwide protests for these men, women and children, killed and maimed in their schools, hospitals and family weddings? Were there any protests at all?

Where the community tensions for ongoing conflict in Sudan, Ethiopia, Niger, Burkina Faso or Mali? Mostly, we’re not even aware of these catastrophic conflicts resulting in tens of thousands of deaths.

All war is a tragedy in my book. The mention of other conflicts is not to belittle the extreme suffering of the people of the Levant, or a plea to look the other way.

We should definitely call for a cessation of hostilities, demand an end to the targetting of civilian infrastructure, and do all we can to address the unfolding humanitarian crisis.

But the present is also a time for wisdom. There are many amongst us — on all sides — who wish to foment armageddon.

There are those who wish to set that whole region alight, drawing it into yet more anarchic chaos, as if the disasters of Iraq, Syria and Libya were not enough.

There are still others who wish to sow discord on our own streets, stoking the rise of the far right pitted against minority communities everywhere.

Some opportunists in government may seek to use it to their personal advantage in the next challenge for leadership.

A failing government as a whole, bereft of ideas, presiding over a rise in poverty and health inequalities, will certainly embrace yet another culture war.

In the summer, long before the events of the past month, senior spokesmen for Hamas gave media interviews in which they said a regional war was inevitable. Talking heads on the other side said much the same.

Alas, some people seek war, whatever the cost to civil society. Some imagine that some kind of utopia lies on the other side, over the hill, but it is rarely so.

Now is the time for the level-headed to petition for peace. For grown ups to pour cooling water on these fires. For those not caught inside echo chambers to attempt to build bridges and sow seeds of peace.

But that is not going to happen if we buy into this game of us and them, divide and conquer. Somebody needs to stand up and demand, “Not in my name.”

Now is a time for wisdom.