The Catholic Peace Weekly's column on Faith and Science provides some background to understand our events.
The 1986 TV movie Sword of Gideon deals with Israel's revenge for the massacre of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It is a spy movie with action and thrills. Still, it is a masterpiece that makes you think about where violence ends and what true peace and forgiveness are in the vicious cycle of revenge begetting revenge.
This movie influenced Steven Spielberg's film Munich (2005), which deals with the same incident. Israel seems to be taking the Old Testament passage, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth (⋯) (Exodus 21:24-25) very literally. Since starting the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2023, Israel has been devastating the Gaza Strip. On the morning of June 13, it conducted an airstrike on Iran to eliminate Iran's nuclear research facilities and scientists. There are also reports of many civilian casualties, and Iran is responding with missile attacks, heightening the risk of war spreading to the Middle East, and the whole world is on edge.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called the airstrike operation against Iran "Rising Lion" and passionately argued the legitimacy of their military actions. The original meaning of "Rising Lion" is "a nation as brave as a lion," which stems from Israel's perception of itself as strong and brave.
Israel's series of actions from an ecological perspective raises some concerns. In the latter half of the 20th century, ecology emerged as an essential field of biology because humans are ultimately one of many organisms that form an ecosystem, and the principles of nature that occur in the animal kingdom also apply to humans.
It is becoming clear that many of humanity's social and geopolitical problems, such as population growth and the resulting shortage of food and resources, lack of housing space, environmental pollution, and destruction of nature, can only be solved by considering them from an ecological perspective.
In an ecosystem, the position that a creature occupies in the food chain is called the food position, and the position that a creature occupies in its habitat is called the space position. These two are combined to form the ecological position. If the environmental positions of two different creatures overlap, fierce competition occurs over the limited food and living space. When the fight between two competing species becomes intense, the principle of competition and exclusion comes into play, causing one species to completely wipe out the other. This is a harsh reality that can be commonly seen in nature.
However, humans have reasons not found in animals, such as tolerance, forgiveness, and a heart of philanthropy. Mahatma Gandhi emphasized, "If you insist on an eye for an eye, the whole world will become blind." "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."
The words of the second reading of the "Mass for the Unification of South and North Korea" on June 25, the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, sound more weighty today. "Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, abuse, and slander be taken away from you, along with all malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ forgave you." (Ephesians 4:31-32)
