They tear moments out of time's flowing river and separate them from what has come before and what will follow. They can misrepresent as well as represent. This time, however, the news photographs from this spasm of Middle East violence capture the underlying terrifying essence of what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. If insanity has a face, it can surely be glimpsed in that terrible footage from Gaza. All wars are cruel, some are senseless and a few qualify as insane.
Insane wars bear no relationship to the costs involved or the issues at stake.
They feed on hatred instead of personal calculation or national advantage. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rapidly slipping into this category, just as peace seemed within reach. Hatred has at least momentarily overtaken the hope that Prime Minister Ehud Barak sought to nurture with his visionary peace offers to the Palestinians at Camp David this summer. Barak reaffirmed and amplified proposed Israeli concessions on Jerusalem in a lengthy interview with the Jerusalem Post conducted on Sept. 28 and published in full on Sept. 29. His proposal for the Palestinians to regain most of East Jerusalem and to call it al-Quds, the capital of a Palestinian state, was intended to restart the stalled peace negotiations.