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0 תגובות יום שישי , 4/1/08, 22:23

אם אשים לרגע בצד את הסימפטיה שיש לו-או היתה לו- כנראה לפלסטינים,העיתונאי הבריטי הזה שנחטף ושוחרר בעזה היפנט אותי,כאדם וכישראלי הדואג לחטופיו ושבוייו,בקטע הזה שכתב:

Of course, at first glance, there was not much to take heart from in my situation.

But the fact was that I had not been killed, and I was not being beaten around.

I was being fed reasonably, and I decided that my conditions could have been much, much worse.

Whatever else it was, my Gazan incarceration was not what Iraqi prisoners had been forced to endure at Abu Ghraib jail.

It was not the Russian Gulag, and it certainly was not the Nazi death camps.

I felt that I would not be able to pick up a book again about the Holocaust without feeling a sense of shame, if I were somehow to break down mentally under the very, very, very much easier circumstances of my captivity.

I thought too that, unfortunately, every day around the world, people are being told that they have cancer, and that they only have a year or two to live. But the vast majority of them find the strength to face the end of their lives with dignity and courage.

I, on the other hand, was just waiting for my life to begin again, and I told myself that it would be shameful if I could not conduct myself with some grace in the face of my much lesser challenge.

And in its search for inspiration, my mind took me down what may sound to you like some rather strange paths.

But for me, as impressive as any story of endurance, is that of the explorer, Ernest Shackleton.

Shackleton and six of his crew spent 16 days crossing 1,300 km of ocean

After his ship was crushed by the Antarctic ice nearly a century ago, he took a tiny lifeboat and set out across the great wastes of the stormy Southern Ocean. He aimed for an almost unimaginably small island far beyond his horizon, and eventually he reached it.

And in my prison, I felt that I needed some kind of mental lifeboat, to help me cross the great ocean of time that lay before me, aiming for that almost unimaginable moment far beyond my horizon when I might somehow go free.

And so I took all the positive thoughts I could muster and lashed them together in my mind, like planks in a psychological raft that I hoped would buoy me up.

And in some ways it did. It was one of several mental devices, or tricks, or props that helped me get through.

In this way, I fought what was the psychological battle of my life.

God knows, it was hard, and lonely, and there were many dark passages when I edged close to despair.

But I was always in the fight, and there was no collapse.

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