The Distant Ocean

"We own your parliament" (White House edition)

I don't usually just swipe stuff from Antiwar.com, but this gobsmacking story really can't get enough exposure.  When the UN Security Council passed its resolution on Gaza last Friday, the U.S. abstained—which was a major surprise to the UNSC's members, since the U.S. had been right at the center of the negotiations that led to the final document.  I was surprised as well when I first heard about it; I would have expected either a vote or a veto (threatened, so that a vote would never have been called).  So why the sudden change of heart?

Upon receiving word that the US was planning to vote in favor of the resolution - viewed by Israel as impractical and failing to address its security concerns - [Israeli prime minister Ehud] Olmert demanded to get Bush on the phone, and refused to back down after being told that the president was delivering a lecture in Philadelphia. Bush interrupted his lecture to answer Olmert's call, the premier said.

America could not vote in favor of such a resolution, Olmert told Bush. Soon afterwards, Rice abstained when votes were counted at the UN.

It's no rarity for the U.S. to take marching orders from Israel (search for "no-surprise rule" in the linked article), but it's rare to have it done so openly and in such a humiliating context, and rarer still to get such a direct account of it.  This doesn't definitively answer the tail-or-dog question—mainly because there is no single answer—but it removes any doubt that there really is a meaningful question there.

[ See here for the original "We own your parliament" posting. ]

UPDATE: Some more details:

Mr Olmert said: "Mr Bush gave an order to the Secretary of State Rice and she did not vote in favour of it – a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organised and manoeuvred for. She was left pretty shamed and abstained on a resolution she arranged." [...]

I told [Bush], 'You can't vote in favour of this resolution'. He said, 'Listen, I don't know about it, I didn't see it, I'm not familiar with the phrasing'."

Mr Olmert then apparently brusquely told President Bush: "I'm familiar with it. You can't vote in favour."

If they can be turned, they will be powerful allies

I've just learned that the Anti-Defamation League's tagline for their Gaza propaganda campaign is "Israel Strikes Back".  While I may not agree with their views, it's hard to find fault with their cultural reference.

The bottomless narcissism of the alpha victims

Prepare to gag:

To many abroad, the picture could not be clearer: Israel's war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of Hamas, causing untold human suffering, bombing an already isolated and impoverished population into the Stone Age, and it must be stopped. But here in Israel, very few among the Jewish population see it that way.

How can a war that looks so awful - in which a civilian crowd near a United Nations school was hit, killing several dozen, and Red Cross workers were denied access to scores of dead and wounded for days, causing global outrage - be supported by such a vast Israeli public?

Since Israeli warplanes opened the assault on Gaza 18 days ago, voices of dissent in this country have been rare. And while tens of thousands have poured into the streets of world capitals demonstrating against the Israeli military operation, rallies here have been lucky to draw 1,000 participants. The Peace Now organization has received many messages from supporters telling it to stay out of the streets on this one.

As The Jerusalem Post editorial page put it Monday, the world must be wondering, Do Israelis really believe that everybody is wrong and they alone are right? The answer is yes.

"It is very frustrating for us not to be understood," said Yoel Esteron, editor of a daily business newspaper called Calcalist. "Almost 100 percent of Israelis feel that the world is hypocritical. Where was the world when our cities were rocketed for eight years and our soldier was kidnapped? Why should we care about the world's view now?"

There you have it: Israel is always the victim, even when it's slaughtering Palestinians by the hundreds (especially when it's slaughtering Palestinians by the hundreds).

Regarding the "everybody is wrong and they alone are right", I've heard this explicitly from supporters of Israel.  I mean that literally: I've asked them, "So you really feel that you're right and the entire rest of the world is wrong?", and they've agreed that yes, that's just what they feel.  In fact they even have a canned response for it (which I know is canned because I've heard it multiple times from different people in different situations): "In the 1800s most people felt slavery was right, but did that make it so?"

So there you have it: Israel's daily theft of Palestinian land and its frequent outbursts of insane violence in support of that project are as morally justified as the movement to abolish slavery.

An Israeli hero speaks out

As I always say, the most forceful voices criticizing Israel are those of Israelis (and non-Israeli Jews) themselves, as Uri Avnery illustrates in this blistering commentary:

Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

Like me, he feels that the tide of opinion is turning:

What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.

In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.

We're lucky to have people like Avnery who are willing to speak out honestly and fearlessly, and who not only feel that it's possible to support the existence of Israel without holding back their harshest criticisms but consider it a moral responsibility.  Read the rest here.

Gaza link roundup

Regular eyewitness accounts from two volunteers on the ground in Gaza: Eva Bartlett and Sharon Lock.

Also worth your time is the anti-Zionist blog Jews sans Frontieres, which I like not only for its insight and acid wit but for the fine European game show/Peter Gabriel name reference.  I particularly enjoyed their rendition of the UN Security Council resolution on Gaza, but be warned that you shouldn't read it unless you can take your humor black.

If you have Gaza/Israel-related links you'd like to share, please do.

(My sign for this Saturday's protest, by the way: "9/11 x 50 = Gaza".)

Who are the dead?

The person in Gaza who said to me that "We are dead people who are still breathing" was Amjad Shawa, the director of PNGO.  I could see the truth of it in his eyes as he read about three young teenage boys who were shot and killed outside the Netzarim settlement.  The bodies had been crushed afterward by tanks or bulldozers (possibly as a precaution in case they were wearing bomb vests), and the pictures of the mutilated kids were circulating among the people in Gaza.

So horrors were never far away, at this time or any other.  But those weren't the only things the Palestinians in Gaza focused on, and despite the weight of their daily life I've never been among people who were more open, welcoming, joyful, or quick to laughter.  Despite the dark picture I've drawn of Amjad, he had a sly sense of humor and a mischievous smile that he flashed easily and often.  There was a real vitality in Gaza and the West Bank that seemed to come from putting the highest value on things that actually matter: family, friends (old and new), and time spent together.  My experiences were a bit self-selecting, especially given justly famous Arab hospitality; nonetheless I met dozens of people while I was there and had the chance to observe many more, and what I saw was always the same, whether it was directed at me or not.

(The horror and humor would often mix.  When I was in Rafah the Israelis shot in the direction of my group and some kids on bikes, and we asked Amjad about it later.  His response: "You never know with the Israelis...sometimes they shoot to say hello, sometimes they shoot to say goodbye."  And even now, under constant bombardment, they joke: "Look outside, F-16 jet fighters are smiling for you, missiles are dancing for you, zannana [the Palestinian name for pilotless drones] are singing for you. I requested them all to wish you a happy new year," and "While other people around the world celebrate, it seems the Israeli air force is trying to save us the cost of fireworks."  Palestinian humor rarely lacks a sting, but it's also rarely lacking.)

The one thing that moved me the most was the generosity of spirit.  The people I spoke with (human rights workers, doctors, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, people selling tea in checkpoint lines just to stay alive, and everyone in between) almost universally showed a deep level of understanding and compassion, even toward the Israelis and Americans who were causing them so much pain. They had every right to feel otherwise, but although I saw some anger the overwhelming message was that they just wanted to live in peace—a peace both for them and their neighbors.  It brought home for me that ignorance is a critical component of callousness, and that when people genuinely understand what it means to suffer it makes them more understanding rather than less, and they're far less likely to wish it on others.

The contrast couldn't have been greater when I came back here to the TV and mall culture—a country obsessed with trivialities, where so many people have tremendous privilege and endless opportunities and yet feel isolated and empty as they try to buy their way to happiness.  We're so divorced from basic human empathy that we get a vicarious frisson of power whenever our government is blowing the shit out of the latest ultimate evil threat to our very existence, with no consideration for the lives of those under the bombs.  And so I had to wonder: just who are the dead?

A turning point

In one sense, Israel's current atrocity is just one more entry in a long history of violence.  But the massacre Israel is executing now in Gaza with such cold, methodical efficiency feels somehow qualitatively different.  This is an attack on a population that's been subjected to degradation, siege warfare, and psychological torture (in varying degrees) for years—and the victims are people who had already been singled out for a century's worth of discrimination, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and much worse by the Israelis and their Zionist forebears.  It's an act of unmitigated evil and almost unimaginable cruelty, and I have a feeling that the ultimate repercussions may be far out of proportion to the attack itself, in many ways and on many levels.

Most of those are anywhere from awful to horrific, but there are exceptions.  Just one example: the damage that's being done to Israel's international support.  Here's how the EU foreign affairs commissioner summed it up:

"We have come to Israel in order to advance the initiative for a humanitarian ceasefire and I will tell you, Mr President, that you have a serious problem with international advocacy, and that Israel's image is being destroyed," EU foreign affairs commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told Israeli President Shimon Peres during the visit of an EU delegation in the region.

This is what the Vatican's justice and peace minister had to say:

"Defenceless populations are always the ones who pay. Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp," said Cardinal Martino.

And these kinds of reactions are the rule, not the exception:

Israel has taken a battering in the global propaganda battle over its war with Hamas, despite deploying all the latest weaponry from YouTube videos to Twitter blogs and an overworked spokeswoman.

Governments worldwide have slammed the Israeli military onslaught on the Gaza Strip, with the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, condemning attacks near UN schools that killed dozens and foreign media angry at being kept out of the Palestinian territory.

"Israel's image is being destroyed" is a nuclear bomb in terms of diplomatic language, and the fact that the EU's representative was willing to say it publicly speaks volumes.  This could turn out to be a genuine turning point in the way Israel is viewed by other nations, not just another flare-up of anger that dies away once the bombs stop—and if that's true, it could have far-reaching effects down the road.  We'll see.

UPDATE: Here's a quote from a "European ambassador stationed in Israel":

"The international organizations in Gaza are talking about 200 dead children," he said. "I don't know how to explain these things to myself, never mind to my government," added the ambassador. "Your action is brutal and you don't realize how much damage this is causing you in the world. This is not only short term. It's damage for years. Is this the Israel you want to be?"

Yes, this is the Israel they want to be—and given that fact, I'm glad that more people in the world are finally waking up to it.

"We are dead people who are still breathing"

Our tax dollars at work:

In Naim Street Beit Hanoun, at 9.30pm on Sunday, Samieh Kaferna , 40, was hit by flying shrapnel to his head. Neighbours called him to come to their home. Fearing his home would be struck, he and a group of relatives began to move from one home to another, to be safer.

The second missile struck them down directly. When we arrived one man, eyes gigantic, was being dragged into the pavement, half of his lower body shredded, his intestines slopping out. He was alive, his relatives were screaming, we managed to take four, whilst six others, charred and dismembered, were brought in on the back of an open cattle truck. Beit Hanoun Hospital was chaos, with screaming relatives and burning bodies. Three men died in the attack, 10 were injured, six from the same Abu Harbid family. Three had to have leg amputations, and one a double amputation. [...]

A Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees ambulance was fired upon at approximately 8.30am on Sunday morning killing Paramedic and father of five, Arafa El Deyem, 35. He and another rescue worker had been evacuating casualties which had come under fire from an Israeli tank East of Jabaliya in the North of the Gaza Strip. Witnesses report that as the door of the ambulance was being closed a tank shell hit El Deyem. El Deyem died from a massive loss of blood following a major trauma to his chest. Paramedics I ride with cherish his memory, carrying his photo - a kind and strong looking, bearded man - on their mobile phones.

This is from Ewa Jasiewicz, who's currently in Gaza volunteering with the Palestinian Red Crescent.  She compares the attack on Gaza to Israel's 2002 rampage in the Jenin refugee camp, but as awful as that was, what Israel is doing in Gaza now seems much worse to me: all the same crimes but on a much bigger scale, and—crucially—without the mitigating factor of nearby Jewish settlers (real human beings whose lives matter, as opposed to the upright-walking animals who otherwise infest the Occupied Territories) to restrain the ferocity of the attack.

This is just what we feared when I was in Gaza in 2002 with other activists, positioning ourselves against an Israeli invasion that never materialized.  And when Israel announced its pullback from Gaza in 2005 it was clear to me that one of the main effects would be to create a huge free-fire zone for the eventual and inevitable Israeli military onslaught.  Now that that day has finally come, it's even worse than I thought it would be: in just under two weeks, the numbers of those killed and maimed in Gaza are already nearing the levels of Israel's month-long 2006 assault on Lebanon.

And still there's no end in sight, no matter when Israel finally decides to let up on their latest killing spree—which will temporarily stop the wholesale killing, but not the less telegenic daily suffering.  As a Palestinian human rights worker (and friend) in Gaza said to me in 2002, in words I'll never forget, "They died once in Jenin; we are dying every day. We are dead people who are still breathing."

UPDATE: More on the life (rather than the death) of Arafa al Dayem here, from another Western volunteer in Gaza:

A science teacher by profession, Arafa had volunteered as an emergency medic for 8 years.  He was delightful, warm, had a nice singing voice, and was not at all shy about being silly.  I remember him stomping ridiculously around the now-vacated Jabaliya PRCS office (Israeli soldiers have taken over the area) saying he was hungry, very hungry, and chomping down on the bread and cheese that we had for a meal.

I had the privilege of working one night with Arafa, of seeing his professionalism and his humanity.  "He wanted to die like that, helping our people," Osama, a fellow medic told me.  Not a martyr complex, so engineered by living with death, occupation, invasions, humiliation, and injustice for so long, but a dedication to his work, to people.

"The shrill rhetoric of victimhood"

Some perspectives from Jewish academics on the use and abuse of the victim narrative in Israel.  First Avi Shlaim (in an article you should definitely read in its entirety):

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

Neve Gordon:

Thus, despite the ever-increasing loss of life in the Gaza Strip, Israel remains the perpetual victim. ... Over the past few years, I have, however, become a critical consumer of Israeli news, and therefore can see through the perpetuation of the image that Israel and its Jewish majority are the victims and how, regardless of what happens, we are presented as the moral players in this conflict. Therefore, this kind of reportage, where the huge death toll in Gaza is elided and Jewish suffering is underscored, no longer shocks me.

And finally Ilan Pappe:

This appalling self-justification for the inhumanity and impunity is not just annoying, it is a subject worth dwelling on, if one wants to understand the international immunity for the massacre that rages on in Gaza.

It is based first and foremost on sheer lies transmitted with a newspeak reminiscent of darker days in 1930s Europe. Every half an hour a news bulletin on the radio and television describes the victims of Gaza as terrorists and Israel's massive killings of them as an act of self-defense. Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that defends itself against a great evil.

As always, some of the strongest voices condemning Israel's murderous actions are those of Jews themselves.

Just what is "reality", anyway?

Criticizing corporations for pathological lying is like knocking mosquitoes for sucking your blood—if they didn't do it, they wouldn't be corporations.  That doesn't make it any less fun, though.

Case in point: JetBlue's posturing after its financial settlement with Raed Jarrar, who was told he couldn't board a flight from JFK to Oakland until he covered up the shirt he was wearing that said "We Will Not Be Silent" in both English and Arabic.  Here's an excerpt of JetBlue's email statement:

In the settlement, Jarrar has acknowledged that neither JetBlue nor TSA officials admit any wrongdoing whatsoever with respect to his claims; in point of fact, JetBlue continues to deny, outright, every critical aspect of Mr. Jarrar's version of events.

What's included in "every critical aspect", you ask?  It just so happens that I've come into possession of a full copy of the email above, and I'm happy to share the rest of it with you:

In particular, JetBlue categorically refutes Mr. Jarrar's belief that he was denied a seat on the flight in question.  In reality, Mr. Jarrar did not board the plane at all, since no such flight was ever offered by JetBlue or its affiliates.  Mr. Jarrar's contention that JetBlue operates flights out of JFK airport is similarly fallacious, as is his belief that JetBlue is a commercial airline.  Furthermore, JetBlue unequivocally rejects Mr. Jarrar's allegations that JFK airport exists, that "John F. Kennedy" was a president of the "United States", or that her name is "Raed Jarrar" when it is, in fact, Gina Fufflen.  Finally, JetBlue repudiates Ms. Fufflen's notion that a shared system of regular, monotonically-increasing temporal measurement allows us to fix any event within a bounded frame of "time", and notes that in the absence of such a system her claims are completely baseless and without merit.

In any case, let's hope that this settlement will deter the airlines from any further clothing-related repression.

Plumbing the unfathomable depths of Obama's mind

When Israel was bulldozing the center of Jenin in 2002 and Colin Powell delayed his trip to Jerusalem to give them time to finish the job, nobody on the left had any trouble understanding what was going on.  When Condoleezza Rice declared her desperate yearning for peace but rejected the "false promise" of a cease-fire during Israel's brutal attack on Lebanon in 2006, no one wasted any time puzzling over that one either.  And as the Bush administration talks now about its deep desire for a "lasting and durable" cease-fire in Gaza, nobody on the left has the slightest illusion that their true intention is anything but to give the Israelis the political cover they need to continue killing Palestinians.  The logic is clear: inaction in the face of Israeli crimes on the part of its biggest benefactor is in fact support of those crimes.

But when it comes to understanding Barack Obama's strange reticence to say anything about Israel's Gaza assault, many on the left seem incapable of applying the exact same logic.  John Nichols of the Nation writes that "some may imagine that this disengaged approach confirms Obama as a true 'friend of Israel'"—as though that's some exotic, fanciful notion.  And Glenn Greenwald says that determining whether or not Obama is going to continue the Bush administration's policy of blind support for Israel "requires a clairvoyance which I believe people lack."

No, it doesn't require clairvoyance—just an ability to read and a willingness to accept the plain evidence you'll find when you do.  Like this statement from  Obama's campaign web site:

Support Israel's Right to Self Defense: During the July 2006 Lebanon war, Barack Obama stood up strongly for Israel's right to defend itself from Hezbollah raids and rocket attacks, cosponsoring a Senate resolution against Iran and Syria's involvement in the war, and insisting that Israel should not be pressured into a ceasefire that did not deal with the threat of Hezbollah missiles.

Substitute "Hamas" for "Hezbollah" in that sentence and you have your answer as to what Obama would be doing right now if he were in office.  That's setting aside his stated willingness to let Israel do everything in its power in response to rocket attacks, his repeated vows of undying love for Israel at AIPAC, his appointment of a full slate of Israel's Washington auxiliary to his cabinet, and so on.

And if all that isn't enough, set every bit of it aside and instead try the standard ludicrous-but-useful thought experiment: if hundreds of Israelis had been killed by Palestinian military forces over the past few days, with graduating police cadets massacred, universities and synagogues bombed, and large numbers of women and children among the dead, all in the midst of a devastating Palestinian-created humanitarian catastrophe in Israel, would Obama still have been coyly prattling about "one president at a time" as he skipped off for another round of golf?  I can't imagine there are many people on the left who'd have a hard time figuring that one out.  Doesn't it perhaps give us the teeniest little insight into the mystery of Obama's silence, and a vague yet unmistakable hint about his future actions?

And if even that isn't enough, I beg you to forgo evidence and just consider my request of a few months ago that we assume the worst about our incoming messiah.  If we're wrong to doubt him we'll find out soon enough (to our shock and ecstatic surprise), but nothing good can come from suspending our skepticism or vigilance even the slightest bit until there's concrete evidence that that's the right thing to do.

JANUARY SURPRISE: I'll let you in on my conspiracy theory: I have little doubt that Israel notified the Bush administration of their attack plans, but I'm equally confident they informed Obama's team.  The Israelis want to have a good relationship with the incoming administration, and I can't believe they'd have blindsided them.  And I'd also guess the response was positive.  Given that an Israeli attack on Gaza was inevitable, the timing is perfect for Obama: he can sit by on the sidelines, disingenuously representing his tacit support as deference to tradition, and take only a tiny fraction of the heat he'd be taking if he were forced to support the attack on his own watch.  This is by far the best scenario from his viewpoint.

And I'll make a related prediction: barring extreme circumstances, the Israelis will make a point of finishing the major part of their assault before January 20th.  If "relative calm" isn't restored (in the standard sense, where only Palestinians are dying non-photogenic deaths) before Obama takes office, I'll be very surprised.

Gaza commentary: sane and insane

The always-essential Ran HaCohen displays his usual acerbic perspicacity in a review of Israeli press coverage of the assault on Gaza:

Gadi Taub, an ultra-conservative young mainstreamer, wrote a column titled "Demagoguery, Anti-Semitism, Ignorance," with content too trivial to repeat, though fairly summarized by its first and last title-words. But Taub's demagoguery fades compared to Ben-Dror Yemini's (an Israeli Daniel Pipes) in Ma'ariv. In a column titled "The Most Justified Offensive Ever" (miraculously, the very words used by his Ha'aretz twin Ari Shavit for the Lebanon War just two years ago), Yemini draws a straight line from Hitler to Hamas (no coincidence they both start with an H, just like Hezbollah, Saddam Hussein, and Hemorrhoids), and explains that "Since the Nazi ideology […], no movement has been as dangerous to world peace as political Islam." My apologies for quoting this trash; we need an Israeli demagogue to instrumentalize the Holocaust, and Yemini was born for such dirty jobs.

And even Charles Krauthammer hits it right on the nose...:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. ... At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering ....

...if you read just what I've excerpted here, ignore the mendacious parity of "Israel-Gaza war," and forget everything you know about Charles Krauthammer.

Israelis now safe from life-threatening oxygen

If you've been watching mainstream media coverage of Israel's Gaza assault you've probably seen an IAF snuff film of a missile strike against "a Hamas vehicle loaded with dozens of Grad type missiles in the Jabaliya area," in which eight people were incinerated (and others injured).  But B'Tselem has discovered that this vehicle posed an even more insidious danger:

B’Tselem received the testimony of Ahmad Sanur, the owner of the truck bombed. Sanur claims the truck was carrying oxygen canisters used for welding, not Grad rockets. B'Tselem field worker took photos of oxygen canisters left on the site of the bombing.

According to Sanur’s testimony, he and members of his family were trying to salvage material from a metal workshop he owns, which was next door to a bombed house, in order to prevent looting. He denies any connection to militants, or military activity, and is willing to talk to any journalist, or investigator.

(Photo from Army footage of the loading of the truck and photo of the oxygen canisters left next to the truck taken by B'Tselem fieldworker.)

Now, you may think of oxygen as harmless and even benevolent, but it's actually a deadly gas at the right concentration and pressure.  So for all we know, these oxygen canisters were a key component of a Hamas plot to submerge Israel to a depth of 200 feet and force Israelis to breath 100% oxygen (casts an entirely new light on the threat to push Israel into the sea, doesn't it?).  And even assuming the canisters were empty, just imagine the damage one of them could do if a disgruntled Palestinian dropped it off of a tall building on a crowd of Israeli women and children.  As an IDF spokesperson said:  "The intelligent audience watching the footage will know that people killed did not have peaceful intentions toward Israel. ... I don't believe they'll be disturbed."

(Sanur's son was among the eight people killed, by the way—four of whom were under the age of 18.)

United in joy

Many Israelis are bursting with vicarious empowerment:

Israel's crushing aerial assault on Gaza has caused a significant shift in the country's mood, replacing lingering helplessness and frustration over Hamas rocket attacks with a sense of might and vindication. ... A poll Thursday showed that 52 percent of Israelis want to continue the aerial campaign, while only 20 percent would like to see a cease-fire.

After all, they've got so much to be proud of:

Samar Hamdan ran weeping through the street, trying to touch the body of her slain 11-year-old brother during a funeral procession in this northern Gaza town.

Just a day before, 15-year-old Hamdan's two sisters were also buried, victims of the same strike from an Israeli missile. ...

[A]t least 37 children and 17 women have died so far, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry — numbers that U.N. officials also believe are correct.

If they're filled with a "sense of might and vindication" now, just imagine the surge of national pride once they reach 100 dead Palestinian children!

"Slipped into decay"

On the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, the New York Times does its usual fine job of protecting us from ideologically-inconvenient realities:

Here in South Florida, where roughly 850,000 Cubans have settled over the years, repeated waves of painful exile and family separation define the Castro era. The revolution never met their hopeful expectations, the island they love has slipped into decay, and for many, this week’s golden anniversary provides little more than a flashback to traumas, old and new.

Yes, just as Mary Jane Kelly's body "slipped into decay" when she met Jack the Ripper.