This has been edited from a previously published version.



T he dinner had excitedly been planned weeks in advance.

Five fiftysomething women, who, four decades earlier, had marched against the Vietnam War together, protested nuclear testing together and tripped the psychedelic, free-loving fantastic together were going to break bread together for the first time since Woodstock.

I fretted a bit earlier that day because the news from Gaza was growing ever more terrible. Israeli ground forces were poised to strike, women and children were being killed, and both the media and Canada's government had turned their backs on this humanitarian disaster.

Even now, the usual opinionators at The New York Times are strangely silent. The newsnets, as Jon Stewart pointed out on Monday, have trotted out pundit after pontificator to one-sidedly proclaim that "Israel has a right to defend itself" and to blame Hamas for the deaths of civilians.



As I type this, the latest news is that the United Nations has ceased its aid to Gaza, where there is no food, no water, no medical supplies, nowhere to run. Israeli attacks on UN staff and installations have made the mission too risky.

This after the shelling of a UN school earlier this week killed nearly 40 civilians seeking shelter. Israel claims that Hamas was using the school as a base. But, as Time magazine reported on Wednesday, UN investigators say they have uncovered no evidence to support that claim.

Either way, as the great rabbi and Torah scholar Maimonides wrote some 800 years ago, a siege of a city should not surround the city on all four sides, but only on three, so that civilians might escape.



Israeli planes may be dropping leaflets on Gaza warning people to take cover, but there is no cover to take. Homes, schools, hospitals and civic buildings are under attack.



Which brings me back to my dinner with the girls, all of who are Jewish, three of whom are the daughters of Holocaust survivors.

We'd had our differences over Israel even back in our "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" days.

Perfectly understandable, given their backgrounds.

One girl has devoted an entire room of her house to Holocaust memorabilia to which, back in my TV critic years, I would contribute preview videos on the subject. The parents of two others both had spouses and children, all lost in the Nazi camps and ghettos, before they remarried after the war.

Growing up as I did in a Jewish community, where the gentile kids in high school could not fill a single classroom on Yom Kippur, I was steeped in the culture and the history. I sang Purim songs. I wanted to pick oranges on a kibbutz. I even called my diary "Anne" after Anne Frank, who called her diary "Kitty."

In 1967, when Israel won the Six-Day War against its hostile Arab neighbours, my father held up a transistor radio to his delicatessen's intercom system so all his customers could hear the news. There was dancing in the booths.

It was shortly after that that I began wondering about the Palestinian people and how they had become refugees in their own milk-and-honey land. I found it hard to reconcile how so many Jews, who had suffered the most heinous persecutions imaginable, could treat another people, their Semitic cousins, so callously, despite how they had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

But I learned to keep my thoughts to myself because the strain on my friendships was too great.

Not all of them, mind you.

There are some friends, including some Israeli-born, who see the situation as I do. They are courageous, risking the wrath and scorn of their families. One of them even hosts a Passover seder in the name of the Exodus, the Holocaust and Al Nakba, the Palestinian "catastrophe." There we mix secular protest songs with traditional prayers, and the dishes include olives and oranges -- to symbolize hoped for peace between Palestinians and Israelis -- along with the usual matzoh, greens and beets.



Like Judy Rebick and the other women who occupied the Israeli consulate on Wednesday, and the other prominent Jews who spoke out on Thursday both in Toronto and Montreal, and the tens of thousands who marched in Tel Aviv last week, these friends do not want the slaughter to continue in the name of the Jewish people.



I wish more friends would protest, as they protested against other cruel wars long ago.



I wish we could even discuss this, just as we do our former boyfriends and those long-lost days of peace and love.



But we do not mention it. Even the agreement not to speak of it is unspoken.



The silence is deafening.

Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar.ca. She blogs at thestar.blogs.com.