My new article on the war in Gaza is now up at The American Prospect (may it speedily be outdated by a ceasefire):
The morning after the invasion began, I ran into a friend at a café. It was a quiet day in Jerusalem, cold and sunny. He’d received a text message, from his son, who was serving in an unnamable unit in the south. The message said that the soldiers’ cell phones were being collected, so he wouldn’t be able to call again for some time. Translated, it meant, “We’re going in.” My friend smiled, with a bit of effort, and then said about the war, “I don’t think we had any choice this time.”
His colleague, a long-haired middle-aged man with left-leaning politics, agreed. “We had to do something” about missiles raining on Israeli cities, he said. The only available “something” began with airstrikes and had now moved on to invasion.
In war, I thought after I left them, the mind focuses like a telephoto lens. It sees a small picture, without depth, in sharp detail. Any panoramic view is lost. The pictures are stills, without before and after. This is the way people think when a rocket launched from Gaza hits an empty school in Beersheba, an Israeli city that until recently was out of range, or when an Israeli bomb hits a house in a Jabalya refugee camp, killing at least 15 women and children along with a Hamas leader. An e-mail I received from an Israeli human-rights group, based on phone calls from Gaza, described incidents in which Palestinian medical crews were struck by Israeli fire. Each story was reduced to a single sentence of horror. They left no room for Israeli mistakes (though most Israeli combat deaths, so far, are due to mistaken Israeli fire) or for an Israeli reason for going to war.
The choices on both sides that led to this bloodshed make sense in telephoto mode, within a narrow frame, shorn of context…
Read the rest here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.
More on Gaza and Hamas at South Jerusalem:
Tough Love: The Moral Choices in the Gaza War
Is Hamas Looking For a Two-State Solution? Should We Listen?