fugitive peace

For a glimpse of the huge gap between how the world sees Israel’s offensive in Gaza and how Israelis see it, I recommend first Ethan Bronner’s piece today in the New York Times, and then this email that I received and translated from the Hebrew (the emphases are mine). It represents a centre-right viewpoint — which could be said to be the mainstream these days, since Likud is set to win the next election — and makes very clear what this sector of Israeli society thinks of the casualties being inflicted on the Palestinians. (The email’s author says that it was submitted to Ynet, an Israeli news website, but rejected).

[…] There are new images on the screen.
Muhammad from Gaza and Ibrahim from Gaza and also a pediatrician from Shifa Hospital [in Gaza].
Worried interviewers summon up all their motherly feelings in the course of an interview:
Oshrat Kotler [a TV anchor], with a look of pain and a tear welling up in the corner of her eye:
“Muhammad, how are things with you? Is everything all right? How’s the family? What do you do when the power goes out? How are the children coping? What do you tell your kids? Ah… the Israelis are bombing because Hamas is firing missiles at them… and Hamas is firing missiles at the Israelis because the Israelis closed the crossings…”
“Muhammad, we’ll be coming back to you later in the programme, to ask you how you and the family are doing.”
“Muhammad… we hope you get through this.”
And Micky Chaimovitch [another news anchor], in a heart-rending interview with Ibrahim that keeps getting cut off […]
“Ibrahim, how do you feel over there… in the dark… with the bombing… what do you do when they’re bombing? Do you have shelters? Do you have food?”
If it wasn’t real, it would be funny.
We got out of Gaza, we put a border fence between us and them, we’re at war with them, with the people sitting behind that fence. Maybe someone can put a stop to these stupid interviews?
Why do we have to keep humanising them?
I don’t understand these constant attempts to show the other side of the story.
Sometimes you wonder whether these are really Israeli TV stations.
Our suffering is what’s supposed to interest us. We’re not talking about preparatory peace talks where we’re supposed to recognise the other side, to see that they’re just like us.
This attention paid to the suffering of the other side reduces the level of identification with your own people.
A picture of a girl crying in Gaza that’s always flashing on the home page of Ynet [an Israeli news website] instead of a picture of soldiers in combat/a destroyed house/children in Sderot suffering from panic/empty southern restaurants/lines of cars making their way northwards makes one wonder a great deal about whoever put the picture on Ynet’s front page.
We’re at war, our goal is to stop the missile fire, to destroy Hamas’s capabilities.
Of course not all the Gazans are bad people and Hamasniks, but at the moment this really shouldn’t interest us. We’re fighting for our existence.
We have wonderful soldiers who are fighting in Gaza and trying to undo a little of the disaster of the disengagement (by the way, has there yet been one politician who has admitted that the disengagement was a fatal mistake?)
We have a home front that stands with them and is wishing for the victory of the Israel Defence Forces.
So please, stop imitating al-Jazeera and al-Manar.
No more Gazan interviewees on the Israeli state networks, no more pictures on the internet that provoke sympathy but not our sympathy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 12:57 am and is filed under Gaza, Israeli society, media, war.