Some Lessons from Gaza

Here are a few things I've observed or learned over the last 3 weeks, plus a few universal thruths.

One's reaction to murder is inversely proportional to the distance from which that murder is perpetrated. Close quarters murder viscerally affects us more than aerial bombing or missile strikes. 

Accepted collateral damage to unarmed civilians will be higher for enemy civilians than your own civilians, unless you're a member of Hamas, in which case you don't care about your own civilians anyway, as they're no more than a means to an end. 

It would appear to be counterproductive to use actions against those one seeks to destroy that function as a recruiting sergeant among those suffering collateral damage, especially given the average age of the Gazan population. 

So long as there is no solution to the Palestinian problem, terrorism will be exported to the West. It is therefore in the West's interests to promote a solution that gives Palestinians national sovereignty. 

As a conflict becomes existential, morals and ethics will necessarily recede into the background - both sides see it as existential, although Israel is unlikely to disappear, as it has US support. 

While the Gaza conflict has essentially been political, and one where Israel lost the moral high ground through state-sponsored illegal settler activity and refusal to define a 2 State Solution border, it's in Israel's natural, strategic interests to portray it as religious by invoking anti-Semitism and the Holocaust whenever it can, thus taking advantage of collective, Western guilt to garner support for retaliatory overreach. 

 One can therefore expect a concerted effort by the Israeli government to amplify anti-Semitism where it can (or even invent it, in the case of Antonio Guterres). The words of many Israeli government spokespersons to date support this willingness to see everything anti-Israel as anti-Semitic, regardless of the objective intention. There is great danger of the Israeli government taking this too far and it rebounding on them.

Iran's covert actions, by infiltrating pro-Palestinian demonstrations, actually assists Israel with this strategy. 

It is not Islamophobic to detest Hamas for the murder of Israelis. It is not anti-Semitic to detest Netanyahu’s government for its treatment of Palestinians. It is Islamophobic or anti-Semitic to attack Muslims or Jews in general for the actions of Hamas or Netanyahu’s government. 

Even-handed and unbiased reporting will be seen as biased by the opposing sides, much like the BBC comes under fire from both the far left and the far right for being biased toward the other side. When both sides attack a media outlet for being biased, the truth is that its reportage actually lies in the middle.

This conflict is being waged on the internet, as much as it is on the ground. People should be wary of repeating political slogans or images in respect of this conflict, as they are double-edged swords.

People should also be wary of committing firmly to one side or the other when both sides have serious questions to answer.