The Cost of War
By admin • Mar 1st, 2009Invading Gaza has weakened Palestine’s moderate president Mahmoud Abbas, and reignited hatred towards an increasingly militant Israel.
It wasn’t just a war between the Israeli army and Hamas but a war between peoples, with even Israeli and Palestinian children far away from the fighting being drawn in.
As Israeli ground forces surged forward in Gaza during the second week of January, six-year-old Ido Erdal was one of hundreds of children at a West Jeru-salem elementary school who brought home a note from the principal asking parents to donate care packages for soldiers at the front.
“It will be a package for the soldiers of today from the soldiers of tomorrow,” the principal wrote. His mother, Ayana, was dismayed by the note. “Do they have to make them soldiers already?” she asked.
Half an hour’s drive away, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, nine-year-old Palestinian girl scouts wearing green kerchiefs, their foreheads marked with the word Gaza in red, were among those marching through the main al-Manara square to protest Israel’s devastating military operation. They held up pictures of bandaged toddlers while dozens of de-monstrators chanted, “With blood and spirit, we will redeem you oh Gaza.”
A Palestinian Authority (PA) employee, from the northern West Bank city of Nablus who was interviewed in the square said, “I want to educate my kids to hate Israel. If I can’t do something maybe my kids can. I will educate them to fight the Israelis.”
Indeed, increasing hatred towards Israel on the Arab side will be one of the residues of the war that will make resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict even harder. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has also been weakened by the bloodshed. On the other side, a military approach that’s indifferent to causing Palestinian civilian casualties persists in Israel. And each of these signs point to a bleak prognosis for finding peace amidst Gaza’s rubble.
The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told Israelis that their overwhelming use of military power had worked. After three weeks of military combat, during which 13 Israelis and 1,200 Palestinian died - half of which are believed to have been civilians - Israel, she said, had restored its “deterrence.”
