Two weeks ago our op-ed pages were full of the hum-drum
issues that seemed important at the time.
Michael Freund wrote about the
importance of bringing Jews from the Bnei Menesha community in India to Israel,
former CIA director David Petreaus was in the news and Shmuley Boteach wondered,
“did a great man have to fail?”
David Newman was worried about the “Yid army”
controversy in which the English football (soccer) team’s fans were accused of
using an anti-Semitic, even though many are Jews and they do it in a positive
manner.
Aaron Magid wrote encouraging President Shimon Peres to run for prime
minister.
Even then, before Operation Pillar of Defense,
there were rumblings that something was wrong in the Gaza Strip.
Gilad Sharon
wrote on November 11 about the hardship of living under Hamas’s rockets.
Hayat
Alvi wrote an important piece about how Egypt “is looking more and more like
Pakistan," prescient comments considering how the Egyptian president has now
made a major grab for more executive power.
Gershon Baskin wrote a piece on
Tuesday with a “message to the leaders of Hamas and Israel." Then, the IDF
launched its operation to root out terror infrastructure in Gaza.
Pillar of Defense may go down in history more like Operation Summer
Rains in 2006 than Cast Lead in 2009. While both were conflicts between Hamas
and Israel in Gaza, Cast Lead has tended to be seen as a major upheaval because
of the high body count and the resulting Goldstone Commission. Turkey’s recent
anger at Israel is also seen to stem from that round of fighting, even though
this interpretation ignores factors that underlie the Turkish-Israeli tensions
that predate 2009. Nevertheless the latest Gaza fighting seemed like a war,
especially when rockets targeted Tel Aviv and sent the
Jerusalem Post staff into
our building’s bomb shelter when two rockets were fired at Jerusalem. In Tel
Aviv as well, our Internet desk staff were located very close to the bus
bombing. So we are affected by the war and many journalists were sent down to
the South, including myself, to cover events.
But what can an
op-ed editor do during wartime? Naturally the paper must cover the war, but it
must also tread carefully between being a war-monger, calling for ground
invasions and high enemy casualties, and making naïve calls for “peace." To that
end we ran an important and incisive piece by
Michael Sussman on “Hamas’s
political wartime gain," in which he argued that Hamas was trying to influence
Israel’s elections and was playing a clear political game.
Maurice Ostroff wrote
about the ever-present claim that Israel is “disproportionate” in its use of
force.
Isi Leibler added to that with a major piece on how Hamas must be
deterred from firing rockets. Some, perhaps many, thought that Gilad Sharon’s
article “a decisive conclusion is necessary” went too far in calling for some
neighborhoods in Gaza to be “flattened.”
Gilad Erdan, the Minister of
Environmental Protection, offered an important view when he noted that “without
guarantees from the international community, Israel will not stop its military
operation.” Similarly
Nachman Shai, an MK now running in the Labor primaries,
wrote about the importance of an international consensus on the war.
Kenneth Bandler reminded us not to forget about Syria just because there is a
conflict in Gaza. The world’s journalists tended to converge on Gaza during
these last weeks, and indeed the Syrian civil war was all but forgotten. At the
same time
Mike Evans, a well known author, noted that the Israeli operation in
Gaza was in fact part of the larger context of Israel’s confrontation with
Iran.
As the conflict drew to a close we ran several
articles analyzing its outcome, with surely more to come. Particularly poignant
were the personal stories of immigrants and people living in Israel who felt the
war had shown them the importance of Jewish unity.
Renaya Anbar and
Hannah
Blustin of Gesher wrote about the personal growth and importance of unity in
wartime that they experienced. These events should serve as a message to us all
that not only is the larger issue of what is happening in Egypt or Iran
important, but also the everyday little things that happen in a conflict, can be
the real game-changers in helping the state survive the future.
The writer is The Jerusalem Post
's opinion editor.