Until today I hadn't realized that there's something, excuse the language, very erotic about the warfare going on in Gaza. Saturday the New York Times website carried an article about the new tactics and tricks employed by Hamas and by the Israelis. Hamas lays booby-traps. It uses civilians as human shields expecting that Israel won't fire at a building with civilians. Well, we know that's not true.
Hamas fighters have cast off their uniforms. Allegedly the operation center for the rebels is underneath the biggest hospital. Figures out of Gaza says that 40 percent of those killed are civilians -- real civilians. Mothers. Young boys and girls. Babies.
How is this nightmare erotic? Because plotting and planning and seeing your enemy dead at your feet has a certain primitive appeal, particularly when they have taunted you and shot rockets at your houses and display an ideology that sometimes seems repulsive to so called civilized nations.
Strategy, the strategy of war, is such a male preoccupation. I overheard a guy at the place where I've been getting physical therapy talking about the war as one might talk about a fascinating architectural plan. Bloodlessly.
But I don't think, that in the end, that even if they kill half the population of Gaza the Israelis will have "won." Because, as we should have learned from Yugoslavia, and Iraq, you can't fight violence with more killing.
For all of this gruesome, orgasmic butchery, what is the Israeli endgame? When all of the Hamas fighters are dead, and the women and children buried, the stones will still cry out.
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