Fearless Israeli Settlers Brave Fiery Rain Of Rockets

Gazing at Gaza's Destruction: Israelis Sip Pepsi

"Here we see Israelis in Sderot – the chief target of the homemade bombs which we are told are the cause of the current ravaging of Gaza. These Hamas "terror bombs" are so frighteningly powerful and destructive that no response against them can be "disproportionate," we are told by Israeli and American leaders; everything is justified in "retaliation," including the complete destruction of the social, civic and physical infrastructure of an entire human community, and the killing and terrorizing of innocent people. It's those homemade bombs falling on Sderot, you see; they are such an overwhelming, ever-present, inescapable threat.

So threatening, in fact, that some of the Israelis in this picture drove down to Sderot from Jerusalem to sit out in the open air – on a hilltop – in plain sight of the Gaza village from which many of the rockets have been launched, and calmly sip Pepsi as they watch the military action taking place not two miles away. Shouldn't "terror" be made of sterner stuff? Especially terror which merits the widespread slaughter and suffering of innocent people? Could there possibly be some – how to put it? – disconnection between the stated cause of the military action and its true purpose?
McClatchy Newspapers relates a tale of two cities in an excellent piece on the suprisingly calm, unthreatened, unfrightened folk of Sderot – and the hell of innocent families two miles away in Beit Hanoun. Excerpt:

A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more."