A beautiful, moving article, Lisa. It must have cost you to write it, but good on you for doing it. I followed the war on the blogs as well, and watched PR turning away. As the war went on the blogs got ugly on both sides. I walked out of one Israeli blog because it turned quite evil. But there was a lot of rotten stuff on the other side as well. But generally I was much impressed with the Lebanese bloggers and their ability to find poetry even amid the carnage. You wrote: "It seems that we are hostages to very old, deeply held prejudices, to geopolitical interests and perhaps even to human nature. Perhaps, I thought one day, the desire to make peace is in fact contrary to human nature. Perhaps the need to hate is something that we must constantly examine and struggle against, again and again and again." I think all of this is true. The struggle to redeem ourselves from our own worst instincts is the most important of all; to understand and share our common humanity; to understand that a bullet or a bomb hurts "you" as much as it hurts "me". I doubt we will ever succeed against the men with guns, the politicians and the bureaucrats. And sometimes there is no choice. But we have to keep trying, or there is no point in being human. I think it was Primo Levi who said that the war against misery and injustice will never be won, but we still had to keep fighting. Keep fighting.