Somewhere, in some coastal briefing room, some Israeli officer must have told his colleagues of his plan for having commandos slide slowly, one at a time, on to the deck of a ship partially peopled — as Israeli sources had already warned — by fanatics who welcomed victory or martyrdom without discrimination. And somehow — intellects suspended — they must have agreed to what the novelist David Grossman, writing in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, described as the “insane operation” that left ten flotillistas dead.
If only (and it would be bad enough) the harm done was limited to the families of the killed and the bodies of the injured. And if only the question didn’t matter so much, so disproportionately, to take a vogue word, to so many people. Gaza and Israel are small places, the annual casualties in their various incursions, rocketing and bombings would fill a Darfuri week. I have yet to see a figure given to the Pakistan-Taleban war, but I would think it dwarfs the victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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