Shock and denial. The first steps in the grieving-healing process. Last week in the midst of Operation Pillar of Defense
Jerusalem Post bloggers were able to overcome their shock and disbelief at the rockets raining down on Israel, to share their critiques, analyses, and personal stories of recent events.
This
week our bloggers have moved on to stage two: Anger. Anger at the
cease-fire agreement and at the current administration, anger at the
enemy, anger at the response from the international community and anger
at biased media reports.
Rabbi Eric Yoffie starts us off with his blog,
Five things I never want to hear again about the conflict in Gaza (the title says it all), in which he outlines and rebuffs five all-too-common statements heard during the escalation,
"1. 'On the one hand, I oppose the missile attacks by Hamas on Israel. On the other hand…”'
There
is no 'other hand.' Opposition to rocket fire on innocent civilians in
Israel must be unequivocal and absolute. No more excuses and
rationalizations. Every single missile firing from Gaza is intended to
kill and terrorize the innocent and is a war crime. Civilized people do
not look for ways to justify these attacks, even by implication.
Check out his blog for the other four irksome statements.
Abe Foxman provides a calm and analytical approach to the conflict in his blog,
The threat beyond Hamas and Gaza, though even his writing has an underlying current of criticism towards the Western world. He writes,
"…what
was not discussed and recognized was how tolerating such assaults
against civilians, and, in particular, doing nothing to intercept the
flow of missiles and missile-making material into Gaza, was giving
legitimacy to a development that is bound inevitably to come back to
haunt the rest of the civilized world.
David
Harris, on the other hand, expresses outright criticism of certain
members of the international community, in his latest blog,
Israel and Hamas: Moral clarity, moral fog, moral hypocrisy.
Harris wastes no time in revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly. He
asserts that during the conflict there were "three basic kinds of
reactions" – moral clarity, moral fog, and moral hypocrisy.
In his post, Harris provides examples of statements made by countries throughout the world from the "moral clarity" of
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's remarks to the neutral voice of the
Swedish foreign minister and ultimately to the "moral hypocrisy" of
Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and of course, who could ever forget,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his branding of Israel as a "terrorist state."
Read this excellent blog to discover who was with Israel, who was against, and who remained on the sidelines.
Other
bloggers who weighed in this week include, Yisrael Medad, who did
little to conceal his disapproval of the cease-fire, or as he calls it,
the "truce agreement," in his cleverly titled blog
Shaky pillar, vision cloudy. He writes:
"My
conclusion is that Israel's government, with Benjamin Netanyahu at it
head, is not the pillar of support the people of Israel deserve."
Ira Sharkansky provided an analytical yet skeptical approach to the conflict in a series of blogs this week including,
Politics in the shadow of war,
Who won?, and
Where we are. He writes,
"We
regret the ignorance and suffering of the masses in Gaza and other
Muslims, and we listen cynically to Americans and others who say that
the problem is not Islam and that Arab spring signals the onset of
democracy. Such claims may be the politically correct ways of avoiding a
world war with Muslims. We may have to accept the blather as lip
service, but not as accurate descriptions of reality. We should pity
Westerners who actually believe them, just as we pity the Muslim masses
convinced by their leaders that they will reach a paradise on earth
without Jewish or Christian heretics.
Analytical or critical? You decide.
Finally, the blog wrap wouldn't be complete without the following two blogs:
The first,
Reality in Ashkelon,
is from guest blogger Ingrid Aria who shares her very personal thoughts
and experiences during the conflict. Aria is hard pressed to control
her shock and anger,
"I
don't know how to share with you my experience without revealing my
disgust for other nations, without expressing my political beliefs,
without feeling the dire need to say, 'Israel is finally acting on her
irrevocable right to protect and defend her citizens.' If there wasn't
such pressure from foreign governments, if there wasn't so much
over-involvement from other heads of states. This is personal and this
is political; it's local and it's global.
In contrast, I leave Yoni Cohen's blog,
What a difference a day (without bombs or rockets) makes,
last; because despite all the anger that so many of us feel, he writes
of his personal experiences day by day in this uplifting blog that
reveals what life was like in Tel Aviv and the very human thoughts that
passed through many of our minds.
The writer is The Jerusalem Post
’s blogs editor.