I've had this column for over five years, I think. I usually write about what has been

most significant during the week. Usually I'm glad it's not about Englishmen hitting each other with dead eels, or how long it takes my rug to dry.

But there are weeks, like this one, when I wish that were the tenor of my life.The letters I get from my cousin Judy in Israel are very disturbing, and some of the letters I get from readers are almost as much so.

Some people accuse me of siding with Israel because I write about the wonderful things the Western Galilee Hospital is doing under the most trying of conditions, or about the numbers of wounded brought in.

But the truth is if Judy were hunkered down in a shelter in Lebanon I'd pass on her experiences with as much concern, as much anger.

For the record I am not on the side of Israel versus Lebanon, but on the side of peace versus violence, the side of love versus fear. I work for a world where everyone wins. Everyone.

I am less comfortable writing now that this little newspaper has become available internationally on the web. I know my cousin will read this, as will partisans in the battle of the Middle East. I am familiar with the tendency for both sides to consider neutrals the worst enemies of all. I don't like it and yet I have found myself in that place many times in my life.

Politics is like a plague. I remember reading a book in my youth called "I Vampire" in which the last person on earth to be free from the virus of vampirism had become first on society's most wanted list.

I often feel isolated in the exhausting effort to immunize myself from the 'who started it' disease. The frustration, anger, and loneliness I sometimes feel are ameliorated by the knowledge that it is the human condition to feel these things.

And part of me wants somehow to share as closely as I can the frustration, anger, and fear I imagine Judy must have felt

when she found herself

screaming at work, and needing to take two days off.

Since I last wrote, her hospital has taken a direct hit, all but wiping out the ophthalmology department. Perhaps it was targeted because it too is a bastion of neutrality.

Of the 1,428 wounded who have come to the hospital, fully half have been Arabs who peacefully share the western Galilee with their Jewish neighbours.

Since I last wrote, Judy's son has been called to the front.