The Economist goes beyond “tit-for-tat” and takes us into the uncharted realm of spin where “cause and effect merge into a seamless continuum.”
THE latest round of fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, showed how mere chance can make events spin out of control. In the preceding weeks exchanges of Palestinian rockets and Israeli missile attacks on Gaza, in which cause and effect had merged into a seamless continuum, had intensified.
There’s no real “cycle of violence” in Gaza. You can tell that from the intent of Israeli and Palestinian attacks.
Palestinians fire untargeted rockets at Sderot (and now Ashkelon) in the hopes of causing as many casualties as possible. It’s a miracle that more than 2,000 rockets over seven years have “only” killed 14 Israelis. Despite the lengths the IDF takes to minimize collateral damage, Palestinian casualties are higher because gunmen and rocket squads blur the distinctions between traditional “military” and “civilian” participants in the densely populated strip.
Meanwhile, Sderot endures post-traumatic stress disorder, the collapse of local businesses, fleeing residents, and lives with terror day-to-day. The town will never get the attention it really deserves because of a myopic MSM mantra teaching journalists to only at effects:
If it bleeds, it leads.
UPDATE March 9: Alan Howe gets it.
