Children of Abraham, have you lost your minds? Sons of Isaac and Ishmael, brothers from the same father, do you feel no shame? Hamas has massacred, Israel has responded with a massacre in Gaza, the conflict has spread to Iran and you are killing each other in a cursed spiral of perpetual vengeance. While your father was the apostle of unity, every day you increasingly become, before the stunned face of the people of the Earth, the sad champions of discord and hatred.
What have you done to your legacy? How can you be so sacrilegious to the teachings of peace he passed on to you, teachings that should compel you, elevate you, and immediately make you drop your weapons? And what does this tragic destruction of Abraham's treasure by his own heirs mean for our entire human world?
As the "father of a multitude of nations," Abram, later known as Abraham and Ibrahim, is the major symbolic figure of universal brotherhood, which his Jewish, Christian and Muslim children have the responsibility to uphold, not only among themselves but among all of humanity. Abraham is thus the name of a brotherhood without frontiers between all men of all peoples, of a unity of the human race which is itself part of the unity of a reality imbued with the same transcendent light. It is as if we are all mysteriously the faces of that which lies beyond all faces. According to the patriarch's legacy, the brotherhood of human beings is rooted in this sublime brotherhood of nature, of life, of the cosmos with that which, having brought it forth, transcends it.
What are our small religious, national and cultural brotherhoods in this transcendent context? Merely distinct crystallizations of the universal brotherhood. Experiences that are perhaps more accessible to our limited minds, to our consciences not yet awakened to the perception of a wider brotherhood... But instead of moving towards this expansion of our sense of brotherhood, today, as so often in history, our small brotherhoods have become the worst enemies of the immense one that spiritually unites the universe's beings! And this now appears even more utopian, unreal, as our perspectives are fragmented by our divisions, led astray by the absolutization of our merely relative differences. This is what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict symbolizes for contemporary humanity: our inability to see the unity and harmony between the one and the many, the same and the other. We have lost the art of weaving our differences together because, within us, the eye of unity has closed.
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