I just read this article in New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/...lk-palestinians-gaza
Although, I didn’t know the author (who is from Israel), I was delighted by his measure of fairness and the extent of objectivity he shows in his writing.
Even though I can see how some of his assertions might be interpreted as unpatriotic by his compatriots, his spirit of compromise is perhaps the
only way to achieve peace.
From the article, emphasis mine:
“Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them,
we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster, despite our disparate strength, and even when we try
very hard to separate. And as we do, we burn the other who is bound to us, our double, our nemesis, ourselves.”
“But even when the Palestinians act with reckless belligerence - with suicide bombings and Qassam missiles - Israel,
which is many times stronger than they are, has tremendous power to control the level of violence in the conflict as
a whole. As such, it can also have a profound influence on calming the conflict and extricating both sides from its
cycle of violence. This most recent military action indicates that there does not seem to be anyone in the Israeli
leadership who grasps that.”
“When the clouds of coloured smoke clear - the smoke of the politicians’ declarations of comprehensive, decisive victory,
when we realise what this operation has really achieved, and how large the gap is between those declarations and what
we really need to know in order to live a normal life in this region; when we acknowledge that an entire nation eagerly
hypnotised itself, because it needed so badly to believe that Gaza would cure its Lebanon malady - then we can turn our
attention to those who time and again have incited Israeli society’s hubris and euphoria of power.
To those who have, for so many years, taught us to scorn the belief in peace, and any hope for any change at all
in our relations with the Arabs. To those who have persuaded us that the Arabs understand only force, and that we
thus can speak to them only in that language. Since we have spoken that way to them so often, and only that way,
we have forgotten that there are other languages that can be used to speak with other human beings, even enemies,
even enemies as bitter as Hamas - languages that are mother tongues to us, the Israelis, no less than the language
of the airplane and the tank.”
“To talk, because what has taken place in the Gaza Strip during the past three weeks places before us, in Israel, a mirror
that reflects us a face that would horrify us, were we to gaze on it for one moment from the outside, or if we were to see
it on another nation. We would understand that our victory is no real victory, and that the war in Gaza has not brought us
any healing in that place where we desperately need a cure.”