Learning from Gaza

The great Israeli novelist David Grossman has a powerful new op-ed that has been translated and published in The Washington Post. “[I]t would not hurt to keep in mind,” he writes, “that this latest military operation in Gaza was, when all is said and done, just one more way-station on a road paved with fire, violence and hatred. On this road, you sometimes win and you sometimes lose, but in the end it leads to ruin. …The IDF's success confirms only that Israel is much stronger than Hamas, and that under certain circumstances it can be very tough and cruel.” He hopes that “the central conclusion we reach from this last, bloody round of war” is “to talk, in order to understand that reality is not just the hermetically sealed story that we and the Palestinians have been telling ourselves for generations, the story that we are imprisoned within, no small part of which consists of fantasies, wishes and nightmares.”