Gaza Today Is About Perilous Tomorrows /
PARIS – Back in 1981, in a squalid Gaza refugee camp, a kid’s silent stare sent chills up my spine. To this day it haunts everything I read or write about the Holy Land.
As I interviewed his father, the little boy’s message was dead clear: whoever you are, if you think I’m going to put up with what my parents suffer, you’re insane.
Few places show better than Gaza how individual humans — real people — underlie world-shaping events that we see mostly in abstract from a distance.
That kid is now 36, if still alive. He likely voted Hamas in 2006 in a majority with nothing left to lose. One can be pretty sure what he thinks about Israel these days.
Forget right and wrong. Never mind 5,000 years of debatable history, or 1948, or 1967. Think about how people like him see today and, more to the point, tomorrow.
Israel exists, but so does Palestine. On both sides, reasonable people want to coexist, and extremists don’t. Each year, balances tilt farther in the wrong direction.
Israelis have every right to protect themselves from random rockets. Hamas militants are tough targets to pinpoint, dug in deep near hospitals and schools.
Yet no civilized state can blast away blindly with horrifying overkill.
You may disagree. But listen to Alan Johnston, whose three years in Gaza for BBC ended with months in terrorist captivity: “Nothing unites like an Israeli onslaught.”
If a wider world cannot bring about a fairer balance, worsening conflict and terrorism are inevitable, along with fresh hatred that equates all Jews to Zionist zealots.
Paris, the place I know best, is a good enough example. Molotov cocktails tossed at a synagogue are just an easily seen symptom of something deep and worrisome.
This requires careful attention to facts and feelings, insightful up-close reporting by seasoned professionals who learn by experience to cut through prejudice and posturing.
But Israel bans reporters from Gaza, with faint outcry from news executives and hardly a public peep. Palestinians working for news agencies face pressure on all sides.
Human Rights Watch reports that Israel is using flesh-searing white phosphorous shells as it did in Lebanon. Who is checking out Israel’s oblique denials?
Aljazeera manages to be everywhere in Gaza, showing mangled children, wailing parents, crumpled buildings, and desperate people waiting for aid that can’t get through.
But U.S. cable channels shun Aljazeera. So, eyeless in Gaza, Americans’ “news” is diluted by bloggers and Webcasters who include, Lord help us, Joe the plunger.
A silly conservative Web site, exploiting the last moments of fame allotted to John McCain’s campaign clown, sent the guy to Israel.
Nothing says an unlicensed plumber can’t do the job. But even a Fox News reporter labeled Samuel Wurzelbacher’s inarticulate misconceptions as “frightening.”
In fact, the best of reporters need time on the ground to sort out complexities and meet the broad range of real people around whom real news turns.
“Israelis” are hardly a monolith. A substantial minority of soft-liners wants a sensible resolution. For them, Ehud Olmert is their George W. Bush.
But the Never Again theme runs deep for many with long memories of a painful past and for whom Chosen People is an article of faith.
In 1982, soon after Gaza, I hurried to the northern border as Israeli troops stormed into Lebanon. As today, terrorist rockets had provoked an all-out smackdown.
Terrorists hid shamelessly among innocent families. So Israel used an age-old approach attributed to both Romans and Christians: Kill them all and let God sort them out.
This was not intentional, and commanders tried hard to avoid non-combatant deaths. But how can you do that with aircraft and artillery in thickly settled areas?
On a kibbutz, I met a counterpart to that kid in Gaza, a 20-something woman who worried about the Israeli army but had no qualms about the fast-mounting civilian toll.
Unlike Arabs, she explained, Israelis love their sons and husbands.
My minder, however, was a reserve major whose job was environmental writer for a Haifa newspaper. He toed the official line, but it was clear enough what he thought.
Years later, Arab kids near Hebron took me to see a woman named Fatima who was on her terrace when an Israeli patrol sprayed rubber bullets into the air for the hell of it. She lost an eye and nearly died.
Her husband, screaming in rage, pointed to portraits of his sons. “We gave up the memory of my martyred boys because we believed in peace,” he said. “Now, I will fight them for 1,000 years.”
This is a tough topic, with every sort of religious and spiritual overtone. Much as I sometimes want to change my byline to O’Rosenblum, I take pride in my ethnicity.
But it shouldn’t matter. A reporter is a reporter, and everyone is something. There are a lot of shades to every ism; broad generality is ignorance.
Over the years, I’ve worked in every Arab and Muslim country. Once I felt completely safe. Jews and Muslims, like Christians, were people of the book.
But new breeds of crazies on all sides are rewriting the book. Reasonable people, whether they believe in the Bible, Buddha, or nothing at all, cannot let this happen.
Barack Obama has a lot on his plate, but the unholy Holy Land should be squarely at the center. That kid in Gaza, now likely with kids of his own, can tell you why.
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