I wrote earlier about three of the many ghastly articles and videos which I’ve encountered since the Gaza conflict began. If I communicated the sense that there’s nothing decent out there, I didn’t mean to. In that spirit, here are two pieces well worth reading.

Terry Glavin has a post here which begins:

In an essay praising the Canadian Left for having lately achieved “a major step forward in opposition to Zionism,” Yves Engler can barely contain his glee. There have been several anti-Israel demonstrations staged across the country, then there’s Sid Ryan’s histrionics, Naomi Klein’s various complaints, CUPW’s threats to refuse delivery of incoming Israeli mail or whatever that was, a rising chorus for anti-Israel boycotts, and so on.

“Palestinian activists, alongside non-Arab activists, have worked tirelessly to make opposition to Zionism a central part of the left’s political culture,” he writes.

Do read the rest.

I would also point you to this Economist editorial on the Gaza conflict. The paper is fiercely critical of Israel’s military operation, but it also makes the following observation - which I haven’t really seen articulated in other mainstream outlets:

Israel’s critics may have to ask themselves some tough questions too. Lives cannot be weighed and counted like groceries. But many Jews around the world protest that Israel is being held to a higher standard than the one demanded of many other countries, and to some extent they are right.

Some of the hypocrisy in the Arab world is unspeakable. Syria, for example, is one country to accuse Israel of “genocide”. But in 1982, when Syria’s own Muslim Brotherhood rebelled in the Syrian city of Hama, the regime responded by shelling the city indiscriminately for three weeks, killing about 20,000 or 30,000 civilians. In Gaza Israel has killed 1,000 people. It is not playing by Hama rules, let alone committing genocide. Russia’s onslaught on the Chechen city of Grozny in the mid-1990s is reckoned to have killed some 20,000 civilians. As for Hamas itself, it deliberately murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants in the intifada of 2001-03.

…Of course, people are entitled to expect a Westernised democracy such as Israel to behave better than Syria, Russia or the violent Islamists of Hamas. But they are not entitled to hold Israel to a standard they do not observe themselves. The killing of civilians is a sadly common occurrence in war. American forces are accused of having killed hundreds of civilians when they recaptured the Iraqi city of Fallujah from Islamist insurgents in 2004. American and European air forces have killed thousands of civilians in air raids in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. So it has been immensely sad, and grotesquely unfair, to watch protesters in London and Paris accusing Israel of behaving as the Nazis did. Just as Israel deserves no special favours when it comes to the prosecution of war crimes, so it should not be singled out while others go unpunished.

Incidentally, one of the features I admire in The Economist is its willingness to cover conflicts and disputes which the rest of the world largely ignores. Like this one, which involves 100,000 refugees.