Wednesday’s Gazeta Wyborcza reprinted a New York Times article by Israeli writer Etgar Keret entitled “Je?li ju? Wojna, to Lepsza Taka” (If it’s war, then it’s better this way, translated by Maciej Kositorny). The original appeared under the title “The Way We War.” I thought it would kick up murder on the interweb but a quick search returned only 41 hits. In GW it appears under the photograph of little Israeli children writing on artillery shells – a picture which did raise a stink, though maybe in time it will turn out — like the pictures of Palestinian children cheering after the attack on the World Trade Centre and the stories of children being thrown out of incubators in Iraq — to be a fake. Maybe.
Keret’s article starts off in mere bad taste. He describes how he manipulated the fact that Israel is at war to get some leeway in an argument with a taxi driver. But then the hair starts to stand on end:
We long for a real war to take the place of all those exhausting years of intifada when there was no black or white, only gray, when we were confronted not by armed forces, but only by resolute young people wearing explosive belts, years when the aura of bravery ceased to exist…
Phew! No more of the demoralising bulldozing of family homes — now we can just bomb the civilian population of our neighbour and feel good about it again.
In the early 1970s the Irish Republican Army mounted attacks on Britain using the Republic of Ireland as a base. Though the government of the Republic did not support the IRA, there was a perception that the IRA enjoyed widespread support in the Republic: two government ministers were sacked for allegedly trying to import arms for use in Northern Ireland. Did Britain scramble the jump jets, bomb our airports, order half of Dublin to pack up and leave? I don’t think so.
Also, reports from an Irishman caught in Beirut (he has now been evacuated).