Peace Now!

I've been watching news on Israel [via Internet--when you work evenings, who has time for TV?] because we're headed there for Baha'i Pilgrimage to Haifa the end of January. At least, God willing. I've watched as the leaders in Israel reacted to rockets from the Gaza Strip and Hamas, and vowed to respond. Now I'm grieved to see the bloodshed in Gaza today: 200 killed, 400 wounded.

Israel seems one of the few spots on earth where there is really no such thing as a civilian. People fleeing from centuries of worldwide persecution, carving a country out of an area that already was populated, [should sound familiar to Americans], threatened on all sides, yet strangely, coincidentally, forming a kind of shelter for the Baha'i World Center in the midst of Arab countries hostile to Jews and Baha'is alike.

The Founder of the Baha'i Faith, Baha'u'llah, did not pack His bags and move to Palestine on purpose. Imprisoned and exiled from Iran for forty years or more by Nasirih-Din Shah and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from Tehran to Baghdad to Constantinople to Adrianople and at last to Akka [Acre] near Haifa, to the famous fortress that Napoleon attacked. Eventually the Baha'is were given more and more freedom, culminating in the liberation of religious and political prisoners in the Young Turk Revolution. Baha'u'llah set up His tent at one time on Mount Carmel and designated the spot destined to receive the holy remains of the Bab, martyred in Tabriz, Iran in 1850: the spot which now shines with the golden dome of the Shrine of the Bab. Mount Carmel now is the site for the Baha'i World Center, home of the seat of the Universal House of Justice, and considered by Baha'is the holiest spot on the Earth.

"Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord" . . . ~ Isaiah.

This is where we are going Feb 2 to the 10th. God willing.