State of war

At least once in your lifetime, you must visit Israel, according to a tourism marketing slogan of the country.

After I visited Israel in 2016, I wholeheartedly agreed.

Apart from the fantastic scenery and the out-of-this-world experience of swimming (or more accurately, floating) in the Dead Sea, it’s a place where major religions intersect. For Christians, it’s a transcendental experience to see the places that we’ve only read about in the Bible, from the Old Testament to the places believed to be where Jesus Christ was born and died.

There’s also the fascinating history of the Jewish state – how people fleeing centuries of murderous persecution culminating in the Holocaust carved a prosperous nation out of forbidding desert. Having visited the Holocaust museums in Germany and the US as well as some of the former Nazi concentration camps in Europe, I am even more impressed with what the Jews have built in their land.

About a fifth of all Nobel Prize winners in all the award categories since 1901 have been Jews. I attended an innovation conference in Tel Aviv during my visit, and I was awestruck by the ecosystem that fosters innovation in that country. Waze, for example, now widely used in the Philippines, was developed by an Israeli company and acquired by Google, whose founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are of Jewish descent.

I was also touched by the Israelis’ deep appreciation – as manifested in the “Open Doors” monument at the Holocaust memorial they built in one of their cities – for the sanctuary given by the Philippines to 1,200 Jews who fled the Holocaust during World War II. Israel is one of the countries where Filipino workers are generally treated well.

COVID turned me into a paranoid recluse. But on my bucket list is a return visit to Israel – one of the countries I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing again.

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Israel is also, unfortunately, a place where faith is driving armed conflict and mass killings.

All the observations about the madness of war and the importance of peace have bubbled up to the surface amid the images of death and destruction in Israel and the Palestinian enclaves.

Being aware of the history of the Palestinians,