9th February
Bethlehem.
One week on, and the snow seems a distant memory. The cloudless skies now look down upon a rapidly warming land, where spring is in the air. The sound of bird-song by day, as the warm sun encourages new life contrasts with the sound of mosquitos by night. Soon it will be time to start plugging in the anti-mosquito vaporizers to avoid waking in the morning covered in bites. It is nice to have the windows open again too, though it is still too cold to have the balcony doors open at night.
I am sure the bomb attack in the Southern Israeli town of Dimona in which a civilian was killed this week made many headlines at home – what might not have also made the headlines was the rocket attack across the Gaza border, hitting a school, injuring three students and killing a teacher. As we know, the firing of rockets across this border is supposedly at the root of the military action toward, and current siege of, Gaza. The reason I suspect this particular rocket didn’t make many waves in the sea of global news is that this rocket was fired into Gaza by the Israeli army, and it was a Palestinian school that was hit.
In a single un-newsworthy event, this death toll of one is precisely half that of the two civilians killed by Gazan rocket fire in all of Israel, in all of last year - none have been killed this year, to date.
I wonder what the international view would be if, in response to this indiscriminate attack by the nation state in the Middle East with the most advanced precision weaponry, the civilian population of Israel was to be subjected to half that being endured by their equivalents in Gaza. It’s a hypothetical question or course, because the civilians of Israel are conspicuously not under threat. Nevertheless, answers on a postcard please.
