With a hefty word count weighing in at 4,515, we’re surprised that Times of London Magazine editors didn’t ask Daniel Day-Lewis to provide balance in a dispatch from the actor in the Gaza Strip. With the help of Medecins Sans Frontieres, Day-Lewis submitted a piece about psychologists (affiliated with MSF) helping Palestinian families. See this snippet for a sense of how he regards the IDF:
Every movement here in any of the so-called sensitive areas, which account for a large, ever-increasing proportion of the Strip (borders, settlements, checkpoints), is surveyed and reacted to by a system of watchtowers.
These sinister structures cast the shadows of malign authority across the land. On our third day, as we stood at the tattered edge of the refugee camp at Rafah, the forbidding borderland between Gaza and Egypt, bullets bit into the sand a yard and a half from where we stood. It was in this place — was it from the same watchtower? — that Iman el-Hams, a defenceless 13-year-old schoolgirl, had been shot just weeks before. She ran and tried to hide from the pitiless death that came for her. I felt her presence; the sky vibrating with the shallow, fluttering breath of her final terror.
It would have been nice for Day-Lewis and MSF to visit Israelis in nearby Sderot, or to at least talk to an IDF representative who isn’t cast as a monster.
