Gershom Gorenberg on the ongoing crisis in Gaza:
The most important news photo from Israel this week was the one that didn't appear. It would have shown 40,000 unarmed Palestinian marchers, children and women and men, pouring through a gap trampled in the border fence around Gaza toward Israeli troops. With tear gas failing to work its dark magic in the rain, with the crowd pushing forward past those felled by rubber bullets, Israeli commanders—half panicked, half agonized—would have ordered their men to aim live fire at the marchers' feet. Ineluctably, some of the shots would have hit higher. The footage would have shown people kneeling next to the fallen. It might have shown the crowd still marching forward.
It didn't happen. Instead, newspapers in Israel the next day showed pictures of a 10-year-old Israeli boy lying wounded in the southern town of Sderot, his shoulder torn by shrapnel from a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip. Next to him kneeled his eight-year-old sister, her hand on his forehead to calm him as they waited for an ambulance. At least for now, the Hamas government of Gaza and its allies proved unable or unwilling to use nonviolent confrontation even as a one-time tactic.
Instead, the "ballistic intifada" of rocket fire continues, as do Israel's siege of the Strip and its raids and air attacks inside the enclave. Each side is imposing suffering on the other, and achieving little else. Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas's Fatah government in the West Bank has no influence over events in Gaza, just one sign that it is the weakest side of the Israel-Hamas-Fatah triangle. One potential outcome, an Israeli invasion of Gaza, would be a disaster for all sides. If there is a political alternative, it may require restoring a unified Palestinian government. That, in turn, could depend on Israel making the painful choice to release Marwan Barghouti, a popular Fatah leader and symbol of either terror or violent resistance, depending on who's speaking.
Read the rest (and comment) here.
--The Editors
