Wars of the world

The Israeli military court has found a former soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces guilty of the manslaughter of Thomas Hurndall, a photography student and International Solidarity Movement activist who was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip two years ago. It turns out the soldier was a Bedouin and even I am thinking, well that wasn't as hard for them as it might have been if it was really one of their own. How we have learned to second-guess everything.

I was in Israel half a second when someone told me how they'd met the head of the South Lebanon Army, Major Saad Haddad, and what a nice man he was. I'd come from an Ireland that had just buried several UN personnel from the Lebanon, to whose deaths the SLA had been linked and – fresh from reading the accounts of their funerals – I made my excuses and left the table, bile rising, heart pounding.

A few weeks later, on a Saturday, the sky turned dark with helicopters coming down from Lebanon carrying the wounded from the two separate bomb attacks on military headquarters in Beirut, which had left at least 146 American marines and 27 French servicemen dead. They came in relays and landed behind the Rambam hospital. I stood at my apartment window all afternoon, too shocked to sit down. Here, whirring in the October sky, were metal birds bearing the maimed and screaming ones.

On the way back to work in the afternoons I would pass a line of exhausted, dispirited men, sitting on the pavement. They seemed like prisoners without chains. They were the spailpín fánach brigade up from Gaza and over from the West Bank.

They would be collected early in the morning and brought to Haifa to clean the streets, to do the work nobody else wanted to do. It was the only way they could feed their children. It would be those same children, and their children, who would pick up the stones and begin the first intifada.

You yo-yo back and forth. Today, it is the dead from one side and a week later, it is the dead from another. And on and on it went. Bit by bit the Palestinian street cleaners were replaced by violinists from Russian orchestras. But death continued. Until one day there was a peace agreement and our children got to make drawings of the peace agreement signings. Rabin and Clinton and Arafat on the White House Lawn and, later, wee King Hussein and Clinton and Rabin down in the desert. Birds of peace flying overhead.

And then late one night, around midnight, the volume of the television sets in the apartments nearby were suddenly raised. Sometimes, bad news came silently. You'd look out and north beyond the bay, flares would light up the night sky. The raised volume of the radio was the most common signal though, and on that November night it was that the Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin had been killed. He was an awkward old geezer, to be truthful, and didn't seem easy to warm to.

But what had come upon him was a change of heart and it is the most splendid thing. It is creative and sheds light. His heavily-accented words would be somewhere inside my ear forever. "Enough of blood and tears. Enough!"

In this Monday's Irish Times, columnist Mark Steyn encouraged us to dwell on the less publicised face of Rachel Corrie, the young American activist killed by an Israeli Army bulldozer while working, like Mike Hurndall, for the International Solidarity movement in Gaza Strip. I went to the website and found the photograph and her lovely features are indeed suffused with anger as she burns a paper replica of the American flag.

I wish I hadn't looked. We tell and retell the stories, reassign the blame. All over the world, in thousands of conflicts, the universal equivalents of Ger Colleran from The Star and Martin Ferris from Sinn Féin battle it out on their own versions of Questions and Answers and it will never come out right.

I also succumbed to an Internet search for Tom Cruise having a brainstorm on the Oprah show. They say his over-the-top proclamations of love for his new fiancé might be a ploy to get us to see his new film War of the Worlds. The media had a field day. Like it matters. A look at the photograph of Iran's president-elect Mahmood Ahmadinejad might lead us to ponder the possibility that, in him, we have a cast member for the real War of the Worlds.

Still, Live8 is almost upon us. Make Poverty History. Care about something beyond our own shores. Bob Geldof kicked it off with a rousing speech at Glastonbury. All those youthful hands joined together and raised skywards in response to his request. Well-nourished hands, bearing no weapons. The lucky ones.