Those images of the carnage caused by Israeli airstrikes inside the Gaza Strip brought to mind another film of bomb victims that I watched early this month in Sderot, an Israeli town targeted by rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
In a bomb-proof room at the ambulance station Tiger Avraham, the chief paramedic, showed us his grisly home movie of the aftermath of an attack. We were told that 23 Israeli civilians had been killed, more than a thousand injured and many more traumatised by rockets since 2004. Nobody mentioned the two Gazan youths killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before our visit.
Mr Avraham embodies the Sderot siege mentality: “It is not easy to live here. For five years my little one has slept in a bomb shelter.” He could leave for Tel Aviv or America, but “I am here because it gives a sense of meaning to my life. Here I am not only a Jew, I'm an Israeli.”
Asked his view of Palestinians, he replied: “I am a health worker, not a politician. I hope for peace in the end.” Many of his neighbours have welcomed the military response to rocket attacks that increased to almost 200 in the week since Hamas formally ended its ceasefire with Israel.
In Sderot, where they get a 15-second warning of an attack, the streets are lined with bomb shelters and schools are covered by concrete arches. Behind the police station the twisted remains of rockets are on show - mostly crudely made from lampposts, with some more sophisticated Iranian devices. Many observers object that the airstrikes are disproportionate: the weekend body count was one Israeli killed, more than 290 reported dead in Gaza. The Israelis will counter that those who start a war on civilians are in no position to demand restraint.
To make sense of a conflict in which both sides claim to be victims requires more than an emotional response to gory pictures. I support the Palestinian right to self-determination. But I am disturbed by the rise of anti-Israeli sentiments in Britain and the West, as when my old friends on the Left declared: “We are all Hezbollah now.”
There is a tendency to reduce the Middle East to a simplistic morality play where Good battles Evil, projecting our own victim politics on to other people's complex conflicts.
The Israelis I met bear no comparison with the caricature of expansionist “Zio-Nazis”. These attacks seem very different from 1967 when Israel occupied Gaza and other territories after the Six-Day War. The Zionist dream of Israel reclaiming the biblical lands is over. Most Israelis seem prepared to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and abandon Gaza (as they did in 2005) and most of the West Bank while bunkering down behind the big new security barriers that snake across the countryside. An insecure Israel will still lash out when it feels threatened, as it did in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza now, even though such military spasms are likely to be ineffective and even counter-productive.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mick_hume/article5408672.ece
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