Video I: Orphaned Land

The majority of the Middle East’s population suffers from a terrible education system; it’s actually a worldwide phenomenon. Our first childhood toys are always toy guns. These childhood moments are the most important, when our personality is shaped, and we are subconsciously preparing ourselves for the use of weapons, for wars, for enemies. Add politics and media systems to the equation and you’ll get a chaotic loop that never ends. Is it in our nature to fight? Yeah it is, but we can educate ourselves to hold different values.

– Imagine a world where we have more education and less economical conventions.

– Imagine a world where all the religious leaders, the ones who claim they are Ambassadors of God, will gather as one and not leave the room, until as one unified voice they declare that war is the most hated act in the eyes of God. Why aren’t they doing this already?

– Imagine a new education system, a one that way before teaching us about the bloody history of humanity, we will learn about the value of life, we will learn that life is sacred and that killing is a worldwide taboo. We will also learn about how to have a dialogue, how to talk, how to listen to each other. It seems to be more important than Mathematics for the moment.

-Imagine if we were brought up believing that going to war and killing someone is forbidden, the same way that it’s wrong to have sex with someone in our family. That’s a deliberately extreme example, but just imagine the same first reaction every human will have to the idea of sex with a sibling, and imagine them reacting the same way for killing someone or going to war.

– Children of the Middle East should play football, play in bands, grow up in a safe city. They shouldn’t run away from rockets, bombs and all the irresponsible wars that we, the adult ones, bring to them from their birth up until the moment they become warriors themselves.

Janusz Korczak, the founder of a Jewish orphanage in World War II, said once, before being sent to his death with all of his children: „If you want to change the world, change the education system“.

Therefore, until we will do so, until we will understand it, until then, as tragic as it may sound – we are doomed for an eternal loop of wars.

„We shall overcome someday“