As a Jew who escaped the Holocaust by moving with my family to America in 1938, I turn on the BBC at night. And what I see are clouds of black smoke, explosions; the dead and the dying - children crying bitterly, cities in ruins. Only yesterday, these piles of rubble in Lebanon were home to thousands. Now, the cars roll out onto the highways, white flags attached to the windshields and doors. More than half a million are homeless.
The Israelis told them to leave, but then strafed one convoy from a helicopter. The military people exert their force without pity. They win their wars proudly. They are the masters of force.
Using the most modern weapons the United States can supply to search out the Hezbollah guerrillas, the Israeli soldiers destroy Lebanon. They wreck all of Gaza, seeking to murder the leaders of Hamas.
Many American Jews gather proudly to cheer them on. The face of the American president remains blank. A patter of platitudes issues from his lips. He is not interested in peace. He is happy to see Israel do the dirty war for him. Diplomacy is a word not in his dictionary.
But lo and behold - even as the destruction builds and the war continues through its third week - it seems suddenly no longer such a lark. Success is hard to come by; Israel is no longer the perennial victor. But will it know what to do when faced with the need to talk with the enemy? It has always felt so invincible that discussion seemed the weapon of fools and weaklings, much like the way the earnest work of its principled and dedicated peace camp - Jewish to the core, in an "old-fashioned" way - seemed pathetic and misguided.
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