by JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
It is a recurring nightmare. The sounds and smells are so familiar; the tension in the air so thick that you can see it like the grit and grime that collects on your clothes and shoes after being outside for only a short while. In July, sand blows in off the shore whipping its tiny grains across your face until your eyes sting shut with tears. Drones buzz in the night sky and tracer flares speed past like little comets. In November there is a chill in the wind when the booms go off in the dusty overcrowded streets of Gaza. The killing is high speed and slow motion together; and later, in January, when the rains start, the streets will flood and the muck and debris of the earth surges upward making patterns of dirty, broken-lace detritus on the curbs and corners, unable to drain away quickly enough for easy passage. Dying in the cold and damp is worst of all when your limbs are left to bleed uncovered. Month after month, the leitmotif of death in all its creative varieties eats away at the people of Gaza. Were it not so unnatural, we might wonder if the seasons had somehow been poisoned.
Forty-six-year-old Ahmad Jabari and his companion, Mohammad al-Homs, were together in their car when Israel incinerated them with the astonishing accuracy of its high-tech, precision-strike weapons. Were they conscious in those last seconds? Did an instant of suspended animation allow them to bid their world good bye? On the dark side of the Manichaean universe into which we have cast them, is it heresy to imagine they may have loved or have been loved; that mourning and bereavement would ensue? That whole families would be shattered again by death? Israeli aerial attacks hit 20 targets on the first day alone of the latest operation to target alleged “missile silos,” weapons’ storehouses, and ‘terrorists’ the righteous can kill with particular impunity – like Jabari, whose position as head of the Qassam Brigades, or military wing of Hamas, could hardly merit condemnation.
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