There is a yawning gap between how the world sees Israel and how Israelis see themselves. If only each could see through the other’s eyes, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
A brutal year and a tale of two Israels: the one that is feared and the one that is fearfulThere is a yawning gap between how the world sees Israel and how Israelis see themselves. If only each could see through the other’s eyes
But you don’t need a crystal ball to know that whenever that Israeli response comes, opinion will divide instantly and sharply, with two radically opposed views of what has just happened – mapping on to two wholly opposed views ofitself. That divide is part of what made this perhaps the hardest Rosh Hashanah that all but the oldest Jews can remember, one that came at the end of a dark and terrible year.
And then there’s the Israel you glimpse in the testimony of the men, women and very young children who survived a massacre whose– telling how they huddled, alone and undefended, in bathrooms and kids’ bedrooms, for long, terrified hours as Hamas men surrounded their homes, firing bullets through doors and hurling grenades through windows, before eventually setting house after house ablaze, yelping in delight at what they themselves called a “slaughter”.
Or take the war that has caused so much pain for all of the last year. What the world sees in Gaza is a benighted strip of land that Israel has crushed, heedless of the consequences for civilian life. What Israelis see is a cruel Hamas enemy that revealed its true face on 7 October and whichYou can keep on like this, each example exposing the gulf that separates Israel from a swath of world opinion. But all this only points to the deeper difference.
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