Baby crushing

I had a fairly disturbing dream last night. I was walking through a lecture hall and there was someone screaming at their child. When I looked closer, I could see that a woman had her hands on a baby's head and was crushing it. I couldn't believe it, and I couldn't believe that no-one else was intervening. I stepped up to the woman, although I was kind of afraid of her violence, and yelled at her to stop, trying to pry her away from the now dead infant. The rest of the dream was a little hazy, but it involved me waiting for the next person scheduled to teach to come so I could report what happened. When she came, she was a black woman, which is somehow significant.

One possible interpretation of this dream, or at least context for it, was that I was still thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when I went to bed. The baby represented the violence in Gaza, and despite the fact that it was unpleasant, I felt morally obligated to do something about it. Right before I went to bed, I saw a video of an Palestinian student in the U.S., who when pressed stated that she agreed with Hamas that it's better for all Jews to move to Israel so they didn't have to be hunted down. This was quite shocking. I don't know what caused the girl to have this attitude, she seemed pretty calm and collected, not someone deep in the grip of emotional pain, but she just cold-bloodedly announced her support of genocide. When I saw this video, all of the rampant hatred and stereotyping that I have seen directed at Palestinians seemed to have been realized in this individual. But I refuse to believe that it holds for all Palestinians, and I can't believe that peace is impossible. Anyway, this video occasioned some deep reflection right before I went to bed, which I think was one source of my dream.

One blogger in Israel put it quite eloquently, "I stand with moderates on both sides." And I do. How can the violence end unless enough people consciously choose not to perpetuate the cycle? I wonder if there's anything actually concrete I can do about it. These online political discussions can get intense and hurtful, driving friend against friend, forcing people to choose camps, but do they lead anywhere? It seems that any sort of lasting solution will have to emanate from within Israel and Palestine. Part of my upbringing (a very good part) emphasized the radical peaceful methods of King and Gandhi, and I've always thought that the american civil rights movement worked so well because of the nonviolent resistance movement pioneered by Gandhi in India. (When I say "nonviolent," there was plenty of brutal violence against the nonviolent protesters, and it boggles my mind how they stood by their principles and maintained their nonviolence.) If only a new Gandhi could capture the minds of the people of the region.