Counterpoint: Gaza

So I think that due to the fact that I rarely post anymore, most of my friends have given up on following my blog. But almost two months after my last post regarding the situation in Gaza, I was surprised to receive an email from an old friend, one of my students from the MEET program several years ago.

She was quite shocked at my statements about the situation in Gaza, and as an Israeli soldier who spent the war in bomb shelters 3 miles from Gaza, she offered her perspective on the situation. Here is what she said.

The Hamas rocket attacks are anything but ineffectual. Imagine what it would be like to hear an alarm announcing you have 15 seconds to get into a bomb shelter several times a day. Imagine what it would be like to have to constantly worry about being 15 seconds away from a bomb shelter. Every time you'd go out, you'd make sure you knew where the nearest bomb shelter was because you'd have to be 15 seconds away from one at all times. Every time you took a shower you'd have to ask someone to stay near the bathroom so they could let you know if they heard the alarm. Imagine sleeping with your neighbors on the floor of a cold shelter every night because everyone's terrified they won't wake up and make it to the shelter on time if they hear the alarm. Imagine living in a city where most adults take pills to control their anxiety and panic attacks, and where kids who are asked to draw themselves draw dead children with rockets on their heads. Now imagine living like this for 8 years.

Why, you may ask, would your government not do anything about this for 8 years? Because you live in one of those rare countries where the army refuses to harm innocent civilians, and the terrorists, who know this, make sure they're always surrounded by as many civilians as possible. If after 8 long years your government finally decided to do something, and the army went out of its way to target only terrorist training camps and underground tunnels, would you think it was responding disproportionately to the threat? If the army made a point of announcing its intention of bombing buildings where terrorists were hiding and giving civilians time to evacuate, would you consider that sinister? Would it be sinister of your government to regularly send the civilians supplies and medical aid?

I do genuinely offer my apologies to anyone I offended with my admittedly one-sided statements on the situation. Obviously, the whole point of terrorism is that even though the number of people actually killed is small, the psychological effect on the population is large, and I neglected to even mention that. Although I stand by my previous statements about how shocked I am at the things the Israeli military has done, it's certainly not anything close to a one-sided issue, and it should never be presented that way.

At the very least, I believe that it is really important to try to understand and sympathize with the people on both sides of the conflict. In a situation where both sides have innumerable grievances against each other, it just doesn't simplify down to good guys and bad guys.