by dcc

"After arriving at my office, at the moment I resumed writing this article, I was again forced to leave, this time because the building next to my office received a threat that an Israeli F-16 strike was imminent."

Jaber Wishah published this line along with a few hundred other words in the December 29th "Eyewitness" column of the Financial Times coverage of latest news in Palestinian-Israeli fighting. He wrote of his family's home being blown to bits because his next-door neighbor was related to a Hamas executive force member. Wishah, deputy director of the independent Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City, is clearly not pleased with the incursion and devastation being unleashed upon the population he represents.
 
As a news junky I read many newspapers and blogs daily but I can't read more than a  few paragraphs of a story about this war. Be it in Ha'aretz, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Al-Jazzera Online or the BBC, I don't care to read anything about the on going conflict over Gaza. Yet Wishah's piece spoke to me. I cut his first-person narrative out of my paper last Monday not because it seemed angry and helpless, but because while hundreds had been killed by Israel's bombings in the days prior, Wishah and his family, friends, colleagues and neighbors got warning before these locations -- legitimate or otherwise -- were destroyed by the Israeli military.

The Israel-firstnicks will say that Israel has the right, without any reservation, to blow Gaza and its Hamas-supporting-population back to the Stone Age. They won't say it in public but they will say it amongst themselves. The Peacenicks will say we need a unilateral cease fire without any regard to the reality of the situation; self-sacrifice is so easy from the comfort of an apartment in Brooklyn. The far Left and radical Right will simply blame Israel because that is easier than looking at the entirety of the situation. Wishah, who is living thought this war as clearly biased but unaffiliated individual, acknowledges the horrific and complex nature of this conflict, perhaps without even knowing it.
 
A friend of mine asked me last week if I was in favor of these attacks. After going thought geo-political ramifications of such an action -- I studied international politics with a concentration on the Middle East in college -- I dismissed his question. I told him the following:

As I see it, questions like "are you for or against the attacks" are part of the problem we have in dealing with the Middle East.  Of course I am against the attacks. We all would rather see peace and security in Israel and Palestine like we would in the rest of the world. I don't like the idea that people I know are sitting on the border with Gaza right now. I would much rather have them at home celebrating Yom Felix (what Israelis call NYE) with friends in Tel Aviv. But a question like "do you think these attacks are necessary" might frame the overall conflict in a different light. In that case I think they had it coming. 

But children never have it coming. But children are being killed by Israeli bombs falling on mosques and schools. Those are facts. There are children who have missed weeks of school, have not slept in months and died because of sporadic rocket fire into Sderot. Those are facts. Tom Segeve of Ha'artez explains that the Israeli people understand that "a child in Sderot is the same as a child in Gaza." But as Natan Sharansky said in the Wall Street Journal, such moral equivalency only continues the "most shameful military tactics" of the Palestinians: "pimping the suffering of their civilians as a weapon of war." Granted, Sharansky and Segeve are correct and this does all prove that this situation simply is horrific and unbelievably complicated.
 
Both Israel and Hamas have a clear goals in this fight. Israel: to let civilians in the South live in peace and security. Hamas: to destroy Israel. While the intent of the two sides are completely different, the means by which they try to achieve them may seem to be similar. Yet targeted attacks on (what I may not consider) military targets is not equivalent to the indiscriminate lobbing of rockets into undoubtedly civilian areas from other undoubtedly civilian areas. Israel was right to respond to the Hamas provocations. Did they go too far? I suppose it depends on who you would speak to; I assume the kids in Sderot think it is fine while the kids in Gaza wouldn't agree.
 
But these children are not responsible for this situation, they will only inherit it.
 
I will not pretend to know what to do about this situation. I will however continue to read a few paragraphs a day in the hopes that I will learn of some kids who thought it was better to live than to kill. Ken yi'he l'ratzon, may that be God's will.

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