The Promised Land – Persuasive Response

Resource Description

A text that details the effect of war on children.

Jerusalem – A story of many, yet very few speak

Mendelsohn is a twelve-year-old Jewish male who resides on the outskirts of the Western Wall in the historic capital city of Israel, Jerusalem. On a hot April afternoon, Mendelsohn clutches the quiet, sleeping body of his baby brother in his arm and starts to weep. By wailing inconsolably, he cries out in pain and anguish, “My brother, please… My brother…” in Yiddish as though he was pleading at the feet of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett himself. Looking closer at the bundle enveloped in his arms, you realise the baby is quiet and incongruent in this purgatoric landscape of blood and decrepitude, you recognise the unmistakable desperation of grief in the tiny eyes of Mendelsohn’s delicate tears. The ocean of men and women barely even take their chances at taking a glance twice at Mendelsohn and his dead brother crouching amongst the wreckage caused by Hamas, making him unable to find tranquillity in the chaos, however Mendelsohn’s story is not unique here. Mendelsohn’s other life is in ruins, one of thousands of the same. According to the Israeli authorities, Mendelsohn’s brother is a statistical casualty within a calculated game of power and evil, making him another tiny body in a growing pile of men, women and children amongst the ‘Promised Land’s’ fallen martyrs.