Humanitarian crises and the death of truth

At the moment I often hear the Elias by Medelson-Bartholdy. Firstly because I find the music beautiful, and secondly because the lyrics move me. There is one in the overture musically and lyrically dramatic description the emergency situation in which the people find themselves:

• The baby's tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth from thirst!
  The young children are clamouring (i.e. "cry out for")  Bread!

A humanitarian catastrophe! Tens of thousands of innocent people are suffering - there is no doubt about that. But what King Ahab and Elijah discuss intensively is who is to blame. Ahab believes that Elijah is responsible - after all, he announced the famine. Elijah, on the other hand, is convinced that Ahab, with his idolatry, false alliances and the murder of innocent people, has forced God to pull the emergency brake in order to make the people turn away from their destructive ways. A dramatic showdown ensues...

Whenever I hear these lines, I think of the current situation in Israel and Gaza. The text could also be called: "The young children are suffering!" A hail of rockets, bombardment, fear, death - on both sides. "There is no question that innocent people are suffering in this conflict. The only question is who bears responsibility for it." someone said recently. How true. Who bears the responsibility? Opinions differ dramatically here.

"The first casualty of war is always the truth." Hiram Warren Johnson once based on Samuel Johnson ("The first casualty when war comes is the truth."). The truth is buried somewhere under the rubble of war. Or even deeper... under centuries or even millennia-old layers of encounters and conflicts. I'm currently digging into this, reading history, biblical texts, Wikipedia, German, English, American, Israeli, Egyptian and even Iranian newspaper articles and internet posts in order to better understand what is actually happening.

Ultimately, however, it will not be possible to answer the question of who is right or wrong - even if we succeed in finding an answer. "He who loves is always right" is the title of a book by Anita Lenz. And for me, my current search for a better understanding of the situation is also a search for a way to love. You can't and don't have to understand everything in order to be able to love. But sometimes a deeper understanding paves the way to the heart.