The suffering of Israelis living in the south of the country is not diminished by Israeli bombings of Gaza. Terrorizing children in Gaza will not guarantee security for the people in Sderot and Ashdod. When they want to fight a war, all of a sudden they start speaking in the name of the Israel’ southern periphery, but once the war is over, they forget about the south and the people who live there. For them, people's suffering is only an excuse to cause more suffering, not to actually address social suffering. Death only brings more death, and the suffering – everybody’s suffering – must be stopped.
But war also has a politics. It has its engineers and entrepreneurs who are sitting, planning and calculating: "Were enough people killed already? Is it time to negotiate a bit, or should we continue? Have we “burned the message” successfully into the consciousness of Palestinians (as the then Chief of Staff of Israel’s army, Yaalon, defined in 2002 the goals of the war against the Palestinians) – or has it been completely erased through bombing?
“Have the residents of Gaza finally accepted that this is their future, to live in a fenced, besieged part of the world, that Israeli officials decide how many pencils Gaza's children would have this year, or how many fish Gaza's fishermen could have? Have we managed to completely erase the nascent, critical social consciousness in Israel, the social protests? Have we managed through war-making get people to forget that the Major General Ehud Barak giving the order to bomb people from the sky is the very same millionaire sitting in his high-rise tower in uptown Tel Aviv, overseeing the production of social suffering in Israel’s poor neighborhoods?
“Have we managed to “burn the message” into the consciousness of protesters in Israel, to re-build the walls of hatred and fear between Israelis and Palestinians? Have we succeeded in convincing both peoples that WE should do the talking – that is, that only the missiles, the rockets and the bombs should speak? Have we managed to bring back home, to regain the allegiance of the poor in Israel, those whom we evicted from their housings and denied their right to a true home? Have we succeeded in pitting the poor and oppressed against each other?”
“If we have succeeded in doing these things,” say the managers of war, “then we can stop. At least for a while.”
Until the next time.