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The Dissonance of Being Israeli

(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - On Tuesday morning the country woke up to the crushing news of more fallen soldiers in Gaza. Nine soldiers were killed in one horrible day. As if that were not enough, the British Daily Mail published "before and after" photos of four Israeli teenaged girls in Hamas captivity. Their bloody, beaten faces taken from a Hamas propaganda video filmed a few hours after they were kidnapped on Oct. 7. At the same time, more rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel with the intent to murder and maim. On Thursday, Israel will be dragged to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accused of committing genocide, and not Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization that has the destruction of Israel as the cardinal tenet of its founding charter and which started the war by attacking us, killing 1,200 people and destroying entire communities. Therein lies the dissonance between what Israelis are feeling and the perspective from the outside. Israelis, traumatized and embattled, feel that they are fighting a quintessential war of no choice, one of - if not the most - just and justifiable wars the country has ever fought. It's as if part of the world's moral compass has gone haywire, as if we live in parallel universes. This dissonance would, indeed, be unbearable were it not for the sense of justice that most Israelis feel in their country waging this war and the way it is waging this war, regardless of what judges at the ICJ from those beacons-of-light countries such as Russia, China, Somalia, Lebanon, and South Africa may determine.
2024-01-10 00:00:00
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