As any jour­nal­ist who has cov­ered one can tell you, war encap­su­lates the best and worst of human­i­ty. Pro­tag­o­nists excel at cru­el­ty, bar­barism, hatred and dis­sem­bling. Inno­cent vic­tims dis­play unfath­omable degrees of courage, kind­ness and resilience. Gaza has brought forth a anoth­er ele­ment; pas­sion­ate par­ti­san­ship dri­ven by ill-informed prej­u­dice and intel­lec­tu­al cowardice.

There is no clear delin­eation between “good guys vs bad guys” in the Gaza abomination.
What Hamas did to pro­voke the war is unfor­giv­ably disgusting.
For Israel to turn Gaza into what the UN children’s agency UNICEF termed  “…a grave­yard for thou­sands of children….a liv­ing hell for every­one else” is less rep­re­hen­si­ble only in degree.
Any­one who can­not under­stand or embrace the idea that atroc­i­ties and the deaths of chil­dren are unac­cept­able, no mat­ter who per­pe­trates them, has nei­ther a moral com­pass nor a soul.
In none of the near­ly a score of con­flicts of vary­ing lev­els of feroc­i­ty I report­ed on – across Africa, the Mid­dle East, Chech­nya, the Balka­ns and Afghanistan —  no side was inno­cent of despi­ca­ble behaviour.
Civil­ian vic­tims always out­num­bered mil­i­tary casu­al­ties. Homes were reduced to rub­ble, lives ruined for­ev­er. Chil­dren were trau­ma­tised, maimed and ripped apart by a pro­fu­sion of weapons designed to do exact­ly that. Too often it was on pur­pose, almost always it was excused as “col­lat­er­al damage”.

                               EVERYONE’S WRONG BUT US

 In city cen­ters, on col­lege cam­pus­es and out­side embassies, Gaza-inspired ral­lies filled with and dri­ven  by cacoph­o­nous chant­i­ng, slo­gan-shout­ing, flag and sign-wav­ing pro­claim and cel­e­brate unques­tion­ing sup­port for one side and total denun­ci­a­tion of the other.
One has to won­der how many of the fer­vid par­tic­i­pants have even a rudi­men­ta­ry acquain­tance with the com­plex­i­ties of the his­to­ry, geog­ra­phy and pol­i­tics that bedev­il the cramped and crowd­ed con­fines of the Holy Land cor­ner of the Mid­dle East.
Or grasp that a closed mind is as use­ful for deal­ing with a cri­sis as a can of gaso­line is to a house fire.
One of the most ubiq­ui­tous chants, “From the riv­er to the sea, Pales­tine will be free” rep­re­sents stag­ger­ing igno­rance. The major­i­ty of Pales­tini­ans have reject­ed the idea of destroy­ing Israel since the 1993 Oslo Accords. Lead­ers of the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty in the West Bank have con­sis­tent­ly called for a two-state solution.
Pro-Israel devo­tees ignore the fact that no avail­able data gives rea­son to believe Hamas rep­re­sents all, or even a major­i­ty of Pales­tini­ans in Gaza.
Yet every­one from movie stars to politi­cians and ordi­nary cit­i­zens adopt firm and even fanat­i­cal posi­tions on who’s right.
I’ve sat and argued with Israelis who know only their own, sani­tised ver­sion of the Pales­tin­ian-Israeli divide, and have no inten­tion of lis­ten­ing to, nev­er mind learn­ing about the oth­er side’s point of view, or history.
Those who seek the mid­dle ground, be they Jews or Pales­tini­ans, are vil­i­fied and marginalised.
(For a mov­ing and inci­sive view of that, I rec­om­mend click­ing here to read a col­umn by Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times)
In “the fog of war” that has become almost a cliché, errors in judge­ment are unavoidable.
When more than twice as many Pales­tin­ian chil­dren alone have been killed than all the Israelis slaugh­tered by Hamas, whose suf­fer­ing deserves the most sym­pa­thy is a ques­tion that would chal­lenge Themis, the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion and god­dess of divine law, will, and jus­tice in Greek mythol­o­gy.
For we mere mor­tals, decid­ing where to align our sym­pa­thies shouldn’t be based sole­ly on emo­tion. Ratio­nal choic­es in com­plex issues require ask­ing tough ques­tions and an abil­i­ty to tol­er­ate and under­stand oppos­ing positions.
To their cred­it (if that’s what doing what you’re sup­posed to do deserves), sev­er­al major news organ­i­sa­tions have apol­o­gised for short­com­ings in their Gaza reporting.
The obverse are aca­d­e­mics who allow par­ti­san­ship to over­ride the rea­soned debate and intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty they are sup­posed to be propagating.
An instruc­tor at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty was accused of telling Jew­ish stu­dents to stand in a cor­ner because it was “what Israel does to the Palestinians.”
“Free speech” sure­ly does not apply to post­ing on what used to be Twit­ter that pro-Pales­tin­ian gath­er­ings are “tar­get practice”.
Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Rashi­da Tlaib, Demo­c­rat of Michi­gan and the only Pales­tin­ian-Amer­i­can mem­ber of Con­gress, may be under­stand­ably some­what biased, but accus­ing Israel of “geno­cide” con­tributes noth­ing of sub­stance to Washington’s efforts to add a mea­sure of human­i­ty on behalf of the civil­ian vic­tims into the Gaza cauldron.
It’s on a par with Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mar­jorie “Jew­ish Space Lasers” Tay­lor Greene accus­ing Rep Tlaib of ‘anti­se­mit­ic activ­i­ty, sym­pa­thiz­ing with ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions and lead­ing an insur­rec­tion” at the Capitol.
One-sided posi­tions, ral­lies, speech­es and pro­nounce­ments on the Gaza con­flict amount to what Shakespeare’s Mac­beth solil­o­quised as:
 “…a tale told by an idiot/
full  of sound and fury/
sig­ni­fy­ing nothing.”
If that becomes a moral­ly accept­able per­spec­tive, the  war in Gaza will end up sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing but yet anoth­er round of point­less suf­fer­ing, death and destruction.

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