The events in Israel sadden me. I got an email from an artist with a shop on Cardo Street, in Jerusalem’s Old City. The whole place is closed now, because of Saturday’s attack, but he is keeping vigil outside his store.
I was thinking about the striking contrasts yesterday, as I sat at a wedding reception, a celebration for a young couple for whom the events in Israel and Gaza are most likely of peripheral concern, at best. It’s that dynamic that always gives me pause—contemplating the thin line between peace and terror, between simply going about a mundane, relatively peaceful day that’s taken for granted, and being hunted and gunned down by people who, for mostly irrational reasons, hate you.
I’m not condoning Hamas’s behavior—they do skip the step of actually sitting down and talking out their grievances, after all. And they are possessed of a certain religious zeal and lunacy that only preaches poison.
You’d think by now, though, that both sides would know that retaliation—whether surgical or more widespread—is at best a short-term tactic. Tenuous, fragile, ghastly in cost, and somehow lazy, deepening the hate.
It makes the rest of us think that neither side really wants a solution, that the only avenue available is to fight until no one is left.
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