On Gaza, October 7, and Refusing to Hand the Wound to the Children
The dead ask something of us.
Not revenge.
They cannot ask for another missile, another grave,
another mother kneeling beside another name.
The dead ask to be remembered.
Remember where I lived.
Remember who loved me.
Remember the table where I ate.
Remember the street where I played.
Remember that before I became a number, I had a name.
So write the names.
Preserve the photographs.
Record the testimony.
Measure the ruins.
Open the archives.
Examine the evidence.
Correct the exaggeration.
Expose the lie.
And when the evidence cannot answer,
have the humility to write:
We do not know.
For truth does not dishonor the dead
by refusing exaggeration.
Truth honors them by refusing to use them.
There are Israeli names.
There are Palestinian names.
There are empty rooms on both sides of the border.
There are parents who still listen for footsteps
that will never return.
There are children who learned the vocabulary of war
before they learned the geography of the world.
There are hostages who waited for home.
There are families who searched the rubble for home.
There are people whose last memory was terror.
And there are people whose first memory may be terror.
Do not ask grief to compete.
A mother's tears have no nationality.
A child's fear carries no passport.
A grave does not become smaller because another grave exists.
Remember October 7.
Remember Gaza.
But remember them carefully.
For memory is powerful.
Memory can become a lamp.
Memory can become a teacher.
Memory can become conscience.
But memory can also become ammunition.
A wound can be handed from father to son, from mother to daughter, from classroom to classroom, until children inherit enemies they have never met and wars they did not begin.
Then the dead become recruiters.
The grave becomes a classroom of vengeance.
History whispers:
Finish what we could not finish.
No.
Let another voice speak.
Let the dead say:
Remember me, but do not become me.
Remember how hatred reduced a human being to a category.
Remember how fear made the neighbor disappear.
Remember how certainty became permission.
Remember how the map became more important
than the person standing upon it.
Remember how quickly language prepared the ground
before weapons arrived.
Remember everything—
so that you will not repeat everything.
The dead deserve memory.
But the living deserve something too.
They deserve mornings without sirens.
They deserve streets without rubble.
They deserve schools where history is studied
rather than reenacted.
They deserve tables where bread is broken
instead of families.
They deserve borders that do not become graves.
They deserve leaders who search for another road
before sending children down the road to war.
They deserve technology that searches not only for targets
but for alternatives.
They deserve a machine that asks:
What remains unresolved?
And a conscience that answers:
Then resolve it before it becomes another battlefield.
Let artificial intelligence search the archives.
Let it compare the testimony.
Let it find the contradiction.
Let it preserve what governments forget.
Let it search a million possibilities
when human imagination has become exhausted.
But never place conscience inside the machine and walk away.
The machine cannot mourn.
The machine cannot forgive.
The machine cannot become neighbor.
That remains our work.
Somewhere between the archive and the battlefield,
a human being must still say:
Enough.
Somewhere between grievance and retaliation,
someone must interrupt the inheritance.
Somewhere between memory and vengeance,
someone must cross the road.
Perhaps that is where the Samaritan still waits for us.
Not inside the argument.
On the road.
Beside the wounded.
He does not ask which history permits him to pass by.
He comes near.
And perhaps peace begins there—
not when everyone remembers history the same way,
but when the suffering of the other finally
becomes impossible to ignore.
So build the memorial.
But beside it, build the school.
Preserve the ruins.
But beside them, build the house.
Record the names.
But beside the names, protect the children who remain.
Investigate yesterday.
But do not abandon tomorrow.
And when the next generation enters the museum and asks,
What happened here?
tell them the truth.
Tell them what we know.
Tell them what we do not know.
Tell them where we failed.
Tell them how hatred traveled.
Tell them how fear multiplied.
Tell them how the neighbor disappeared.
But when they ask,
What do you want us to do with this memory?
do not hand them a weapon.
Hand them the record.
Hand them the evidence.
Hand them the unfinished questions.
Hand them the courage to correct us.
Hand them the freedom to meet someone we called an enemy
and discover a human being.
And tell them: You do not owe the dead another war.
You owe them remembrance.
You owe the living another possibility.
You owe your children a future larger than our wounds.
Let the graves remain behind us as witnesses,
not ahead of us as destinations.
Let history testify,
but let it not command another killing.
Let memory remain,
but let hatred end.
For the dead deserve memory.
And the living—Israeli and Palestinian, known and unknown,
those here now and those not yet born—deserve a future.
Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
September 21, 2026
https://www.facebook.com/steven.g.lee1/posts/pfbid02s8NB3ZHzg9QKjt5tM113QwJM6mqw9WacJURaoseQWfbJaijZwoXKCDb2wy5qUYf9l
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