Worth reading from this Friday’s Haaretz:
Tom Segev’s Ten Theses to consider viz the war’s place in history, why it happened the way it did, and who’s responsible. Favorite sentence: “The Americans are now angry, as though Israel were a pizza delivery boy who was delayed and in the end ate the pizza himself. ”
Also good is this soldier’s (Yonatan Nir’s) take on what went wrong.
I think Ari Shavit (also a Ha’aretz columnist, writing in the World Jewish Digest) is right about the failure of disengagement and the need to try to find another way to do this. I personally would love to see the peacemaking approach come back, perhaps with a bit of Ricoeur’s “second naivete”* in there. Perhaps with Hamas and Fatah willing to work in coalition, we might be able to get there. Please God, I hope so.
*originally a term used to decribe coming to the Bible with full knowledge of Biblical/historical criticism and being able to find the Divine shining from behind the text–ie moving beyond the simplistic and beyond cycicism into something more sophisiticated.