Hope for peace

I was sitting in my internship today and heard a story that gave me more hope for a (eventual) peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli question.  I'm going to rehash it here:


On June 8 an eight-year-old boy, Oron Yarden, was kidnapped at Savyon, near
Tel Aviv. The kidnapper managed to elude the police and escape with the IL2
million ransom paid by the child's parents. Impassioned appeals by the prime
minister, the chief rabbis, and others to the kidnapper to release the boy were of no
avail; the decomposed body of the child was discovered buried in sand dunes near
Netanya on June 30. He had been strangled to death shortly after the ransom was
paid. A 33-year-old Netanya man was arrested shortly after the body was found,
and was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 34 years.

This is from an article that one of the ladies in my office pointed me to.  The boy, Oron, was her son.  Since that time, her husband has passed away and her surviving children have moved to Switzerland with her grandchildren.  She told me that her life ended that day; she has tried to kill herself twice.  However, when the police asked her if she thought it would be ok for the man to be up for limited parole, one day a month to see his wife, she agreed.  Her response was that Israel doesn't have a death penalty and, if they did, she certainly wishes that he would have gotten it.  However, the man has been in prison for over 30 years and since there is no death penalty, he should be allowed to continue living like a human being, not caged up like an animal for the rest of his life.  I was surprised by that.  I would have thought that she would want the worst possible punishment for someone like that, but, while she hasn't forgiven him, as the pain dulls with time, she has learned to live with and accept the fact that the world is a shitty place sometimes and there is only so much we can do about it.  You just have to get busy living or get busy dying.  Her life is good now.  She is dating a wealthy man who takes her traveling and on cruises and treats her very well, much better than her late husband and she is very happy.  She still works in the ICT, though, because even though she is over 70, she likes the work, it keeps her busy, and in a way it could help prevent another instance like what happened to her.