The Attack on Israel & The Tragic Loss of Innocent Lives
Hundreds of Israeli civilians died in the Hamas offensive. Many more civilians - on both sides - will die now that the "dogs of war" are loosed. It is an epic tragedy.
Photo credit: RapidEye
As a journalist, you see it all. Or at least enough. Sometimes too much.
There's the fun stuff. Light features on a new roller coaster or invention or a profile of an unusual person doing unusual things.
Then there's the bad stuff. Death. Injury. Violence. Destruction. War. Famine. Poverty. All manner of human catastrophe of varying scales. That's hard. Journalists grow a protective shell and sometimes hide our emotions behind dark humor and a hard-bitten world weariness. It's mostly a facade. Behind it, we feel the sting of the tragedies and horrors to which we bear witness. At least twice in my career as a reporter, what I reported on moved me to anger.
I’ve written before about the time, as a young local TV reporter in New York, I went to cover the murder of a high school girl who’d been thrown from the roof of the high-rise public housing project in Queens where she lived by a group of boys after they’d sexually assaulted her.
The camera crew and I went to her school to see if they had photos of her that we could use in my report.
The principal offered me the most recent yearbook. In it, there was a tiny candid shot of the girl, having fun with some friends. I remember she was beaming with mirth, her arms spread wide. It was an image of youthful joy and innocence. When I saw it, I felt the deep pang of anguish, but then I felt rage - I was enraged that this young life had been not just extinguished, but that her final minutes on earth had been so horrific. It was so wrong, so unfair. All because of these twisted young men.
Jerusalem, photo credit: Cycling Man
About 20 years later, as an ABC news correspondent, I was sent to Israel to do “bureau duty,” which means fill in for a couple of weeks for one of the Jerusalem-based reporters.
On an assignment from Nightline, I interviewed both Palestinians and Israelis about their long-running, often violent conflict.
One of those I went to interview was an Israeli couple whose teenaged daughter had been killed some years earlier in a terrorist attack on a pizza parlor. It was just her bad luck and that of the others killed to be there when it was bombed by terrorists.
When we entered the couple’s apartment, it was strangely dark. The windows were covered and only a few lamps were on even though it was mid-afternoon. It was quiet. There was a piano against a wall. There was none of the background hubbub of an occupied home. It was like a well-furnished bunker sealed to the outside world.
I was greeted by the father. He spoke in the accent of his native homeland, Australia. He explained that his wife would not be taking part in the interview. She was too distraught.
I did the interview with just the father. He spoke about his daughter and what had happened.
When we finished, the camera crew started to break down the lights, camera and tripod.
From a door in the corner of the living room, someone, an almost spectral figure in that dim light, appeared. It was the mother, walking slowly toward us almost as if in a trance. Her face was mask of sorrow. Even her husband seemed surprised to her there.
She came closer and addressed me in a hushed, choked voice.
She said she had been listening to the interview from the next room. She had changed her mind. Now she wanted to speak. She did not say why. I didn't ask.
The equipment was set up again and she sat down before me. Her eyes were restless, dull and hooded with anguish.
She was American-born, raised in Queens, she told me, by way of background. She and her husband moved to Israel which, as I recall, was where her daughter was born.
She talked about her daughter, about that horrible day when she went out with friends and never came home, about the gaping, aching sense of loss that had paralyzed her ever since.
Her daughter had studied classical piano. She said ever since the teenager was killed, she could not listen to music - any music. It was just too painful.
It was as if she had died when her daughter died.
We left the apartment and walked to our vehicle. It was I, a bureau producer and two-person crew, camera and sound. None of us spoke.
I stood outside the vehicle in the warmth of the Levantine sun. I thought if this woman, her daughter and that girl hurled from a rooftop in Queens. I was angry.
That was about 20 years ago. I hadn’t thought of that or the earlier incident in many years. I thought about them the other day when I read about the attacks in Israel and the Canadian-Israeli woman who was last heard from texting from her closer as murderous gunmen invaded her house, and the young woman at the rave last seen in a video face down in back of a truck headed to Gaza — maybe alive, probably not — and the family with a 3-year-old taken hostage which sounds as absurd as it is cruel, and the people gunned down waiting for a bus, and more. Randomly erased from life.
Gaza, 2014, after Israeli missile strike, photo credit: United Nations
There will be more innocent victims on both sides as Israel seeks retribution for this act of terrorism.
As Shakespeare wrote, in Julius Caesar:
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial
It makes me angry.
What eloquence within righteous anger. Thank you, Ron, for expressing so well the utter senselessness of human inhumanity.
It hurts my heart, at the senseless violence that is perpetrated upon civilians, when war (to me) should be fought by soldiers, who are trained for war, not civilians who leave the military fighting to the military. To me, it is just not fair, it feels rather cowardess to me. It might be a "polly-anna mindset", but thats what I feel. Praying for all of the civil-minded people who are affected by these actions.