What Every Child Knows

One cannot inflict pain on Hamas without magnifying pain on the residents of Gaza, whose support for Hamas was born out of just such violence and political stalemate. One cannot magnify pain on the residents of Gaza without further discrediting the Palestine Authority in the eyes of West Bankers, particularly the youth, whose relative affluence only makes them feel like traitors. Spreading violence means not only new and tragic deaths, but new pictures on al-Jazeera of ambulances pulling bodies from crumbled buildings; new reports on the BBC, or CNN, adding up the casualties, implicitly daring viewers to value the lives of Israeli children over those of Palestinian children. Still want to hit this tar-baby one more time, but harder?