The blood on our hands

By Bradley Burston (Haaretz).

It was easy for us, much, much too easy, to have gone through this entire weekend, and still not see the blood on our hands.

One reason is that we don't watch Al Jazeera. Another is that we don't really see ourselves.

We immediately found no end of ways to disengage from the tragedy of a family erased for the crime of picnicking on a beach.

The World Cup was one method. Another was reflex.

The ineffable anguish in the image of a girl running on a beach where her family lay in pieces on the sand, was shown again and again and again on Al Jazeera, but it passed swiftly from Israeli television screens and from the Israeli consciousness, replaced, in many cases, with indignation over the world's propensity to pre-judge and condemn us.

It wasn't us, we told ourselves. And if it was us, we were more than justified.

"I categorically reject all the attempts to impugn the morality of the Israel Defense Forces," said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, opening the cabinet session on Sunday.

"The Israel Defense Forces is the most moral army in the world. It has never conducted a policy of harming civilians, and is not doing so today."

Were we, in fact, at fault?

The army's front commander for Gaza, Major General Yoav Galant, said Sunday that "the picture is unclear. The artillery fire has been well-analyzed, and the question marks are multiplying as to whether the artillery fire was the cause of the incident."

Say he's right. Say it wasn't our fault. Say we dismiss as irrelevant the fact that five IDF shells landed nearby at the same time, and that the trajectory of the sixth is unaccounted-for.

Pretend, for argument's sake, that the army's statements on the incident were not meant to confabulate, that is, to unconsciously replace fact with fantasy in someone's memory.

Make believe that it was only coincidence that when Army Radio said the probe was to determine who was responsible for the killing of the Ghalia family, it suggested that the choices were "an Israeli artillery shell, or a Palestinian Qassam rocket that landed in the area by mistake."

And while you're at it ...

Say the blood that is on our hands is not that of Ali Ghalia, the father of the family, his wife Ra'isa, four of his daughters, one aged 2, and his eight-month-old son

Say the blood is not that of Mohammed Dura, the 12-year-old boy killed early in the Intifada in a crossfire between Israelis and Palestinians.

For every Mohammed Dura, there have been hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians killed by the IDF in error, in conjunction with the killing of terrorists, or because overwhelming force and remote technology was applied in order to minimize the risk to Israeli troops.

There was no news crew to film them, so the world cares nothing for them. And neither do we. Their tragedies are no less unbearable, surely no less unbearable than the hundreds of our own the world cares nothing for.

We can live with it, as we live with the idea of sending thousands and thousands of artillery shells into one of the most crowded districts on the planet, in order to try to hit three-man mobile crews firing a rocket not much bigger than a broom - the equivalent of going after a fly with a pile-driver.

We live with it because we Can't Just Do Nothing, as if thousands of shells, many of them directed at open spaces calculated precisely to hit nothing, are the only possible alternative.

We can live with it, fundamentally, because we don't know what else to do, and because the only thing left for us to believe, is that it's wrong to negotiate.

"The entire protest was ugly from the standpoint of morality," said senior Likud lawmaker Yuval Steinitz, referring to a small demonstration of leftists near the house of IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz Saturday morning - a rally that included Olmert's daughter Dana.

The demonstration was over the killing of the Ghalia family in Gaza, and in favor of resuming peace talks, even with a government with whom we share only mutual abhorrence.

"Instead of demonstrating against the side that fires Qassams with malice aforethought against civilians, Israeli civilians, the civilians of Sderot," Steinitz added, "they protest against the side that, as a last resort, must defend its citizens, is obligated to defend its citizens, and responds with fire."

In the long run, if we are to be able to live with it, it will be because in fighting Qassams, we have developed smarter and smarter ways kill fewer and fewer Palestinian civilians. On Sunday, soon after a 60-year-old Sderot man was critically wounded when a Qassam slammed into a school, the IAF attacked a Hamas rocket crew as they prepared to fire another, killing two of them and wounding the third. There were no civilian casualties.