Jennifer Loewenstein is an activist academic who’s visited the Gaza Strip for months at a time and has a deep understanding of both the place and the people, and anything she has to say about it is worth reading. I met her there in 2002, and she’s smart, insightful, and a living refutation of the talking point that Palestinians are motivated by hatred of Jews (a claim I encountered from Jewish audience members several times here after I returned, and was able to demolish handily thanks to her example). She relates this horrifying account of what’s happening now as Israel assaults Gaza:
Watch as A, a Hamas soldier, runs for his life into his house. His pursuers miss shooting him so they launch three rockets into the house on the edge of Jabalya camp killing everyone inside (four family members). They are angry now so every house in the way gets the same treatment and without the "militant" to guide their next moves: rockets fired into the interiors of homes with no knowledge of who is inside. Eye-witnesses report this and worse: a six month old baby girl becomes tiny body parts with her mother and brother. A small child is cut apart by shrapnel and screams that she doesn’t want to die just before leaving this world. The mothers and fathers cannot protect them so they weep and scream at the funerals that this side of the world never views, especially during basketball season.
Who really cares about these children? Every Palestinian is a militant because everyone (sooner or later) wants Israel off their land, out of their lives, and forgotten like a horrible dream. It is for this reason that they are all equal targets: none of them is intelligent enough to understand that their land isn’t their land, their lives are not their lives, and their horrible dream is their present and future. Have no pity on those who don’t get it.
Read the rest here.
On the same topic, this story about the disastrous covert US effort to topple the elected government in Gaza is absolutely essential reading (via).
The Distant Ocean 