Curiouser and curiouser said Alice: A man walks into a restaurant and blows himself up -- it's terrorism; a man targets residential apartment buildings (he doesn't like journalists particularly) -- that's justified retaliation.
When the UN wanted to call for a ceasefire and an end to the targeted bombing of apartment blocks, which aside from men and women housed 63 children who are dead, the US president vetoed the effort. The BBC has some of the profiles of these children. If the joke is that the Israeli tail wags the American dog, Biden is more than willing to be wagged. Not for him any confrontation with the Israeli lobby. Its power has been addressed by two professors from the University of Chicago and Harvard in their book: The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The consequences to them following the book's publication are also telling. A Wikipedia article on the book discusses them in detail.
On Sunday a four-story building housing Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf and his extended family was hit, killing him and 12 family members including his wife and two children as well as his parents. The doctor was head of internal medicine at Gaza's main hospital and led the response to the covid epidemic. Dr. Mouin al-Aloul, Gaza's leading neurologist, and Raja'a Abu al Our, a psychologist, were also killed on the same day. Doctors report that roads leading to the main hospital have also been destroyed making them difficult to navigate and get to the hospital.
Targeting doctors and even peace activists is not a new story. On January 16, 2009, a tank lined up outside Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish's house during another period of violence. It fired two shells at his daughters' bedrooms killing two of them out of three. He was a prominent peace activist and believes his house was targeted for that reason. Why peace when a state of non-peace allows Israel to gobble up Palestinian land. A Palestinian negotiator once likened the process to sharing a pizza with someone who is wolfing it down while you are trying to divide it.
Dr. Abuelaish's response was extraordinary. He wrote a book titled, I Shall Not Hate, tracing his life. He now works and lives in Canada with the remainder of his family. The dust jacket has a quote from Elie Wiesel, the concentration-camp survivor. He calls the book " ... a necessary lesson against hatred and revenge."
If this piece has omitted Hamas, the Palestinian rulers of Gaza, it is because initiating war against a vastly more powerful enemy is a prelude to disaster -- unless Hamas aspires to world sympathy at the cost of their own dead and wounded. Perhaps Hamas calculated it might energize the stalled peace process for which there have been talks about talks but little else.
In all this, Mr. Netanyahu's prospects have been bolstered. If a week ago he appeared to be moving to the sidelines with his rival, Yair Lapid, about to form a coalition government, now he is back on center stage. To be sure he has much to thank his supporters for in this latest episode.
