As the tenuous cease fire holds along the border separating Lebanon from Israel,

I've received what I hope is the last letter of crisis from my cousin Judy who works at the Western Galilee Hospital. She says in some ways coping now is more difficult as the adrenaline slides back to normal allowing fatigue to set in. She knows how to function under pressure but this conflict seemed never-ending.

She recalled taking a video journalist through the trauma centre and coming to tears at a tale of lost loves and lost limbs. "Death and destruction for what?" She asks. "Why? Even animals don't do this to each other. Is this why we're created?"

Now that things are quieting down the hospital staff will want to compile lessons, but she wonders why certain topics seem off limits. The close calls, getting caught going to or from work, running from the car, running to take cover... they're not being talked about. She wonders why this is too embarrassing to discuss openly. It occurs to me that we are never comfortable recalling fear.

The stock taking has begun. Numbers are everywhere: number of rockets, costs of life, costs of rebuilding, costs of lost production, costs... costs... costs.

The war cost me a close friendship: someone I love who interpreted my articles as pro-Israel. Other friendships were strained by my lack of allegiance to either side. Some saw me as sitting on the fence when really I stand apart from violence. Some of my friends are deeply angry with Israel and others with Lebanon. One told me, "I don't favour a people who kill civilians by terror."

But I wonder what 'people' are they? Terrorists are not 'a people'. They have no borders, no country, no address. Because they strap bombs to their waists and walk into a crowd of civilians, what logic leads some to blame the Lebanese people and others the Israeli people?

Terrorists may have friends in one country or another but by the time you destroy one country they're long gone to the next.

What can we learn from Iraq, from Afghanistan? I'm afraid one lesson is that killing and

clearing a thirty kilometer strip

of Lebanese soil won't put a crimp in the suicide bombings. But they infuriate us so, we need to find 'a people' to blame. The 911 terrorists infuriated George Bush so, he needed to find a country to decimate. And now he has trapped himself in the futile irony of trying to protect that same country from those same terrorists.

Human beings cannot sit with frustration unfinished, with fingerless blame, with anger bottled. We can not just scream our anger into the air to let people know. We need to punish, even when we don't know whom to punish.