See update, below.
I often find that I use Twitter as my rough draft for a full-fledged post — the outrage (or delight – occasionally there’s delight) begins, and my thoughts start to come together in that forum, and then I wind up over here, writing it all in a more coherent (and less 140-character dependent) form.
Such was the case over the weekend, as news broke of renewed hostilities on the Gaza-Israel border, and I began to tweet.
The whole thing started when Israel assassinated Zuhir al-Qaisi, the leader of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees (a militant group more extremist than Hamas) in an airstrike near Gaza City on Friday. Israel claims that al-Qaisi was in the process of planning another attack like the one last August for which it holds the PRC responsible, an attack in which eight Israelis were murdered outside of Eilat (Israel’s southern-most point).
The problems with just that first paragraph are myriad, however, starting with the fact that extra-judicial assassinations are illegal and immoral. Even if one presumes al-Qaisi’s guilt, his assistant was also killed in that initial attack. Moreover, I, for one, have learned not to immediately trust any government that drops information like “so-and-so was about to kill us, that’s why we had to take him out” — governments have very, very good reasons to lie about these things, and, if Israel was in fact lying this time, it had an especially good reason to do so: Those involved in last August’s Eilat attack didn’t actually come from Gaza, where al-Qaisi and the PRC are located. The terrorists came from the Sinai.
Like a great many people who live in the real world, I spent all of last week dealing — by which I mean: professionally, quasi-professionally (aka: this blog, Twitter, other blogs), mentally, and emotionally — with an enormous slew of horrible things. Horrible, horrifying, horrific things. Things that, one way or another, always happen to humanity, to the world — there are always horrible things happening — but last week, they seemed to cluster together, like metal filings on a magnet, one big spiky bunch of Awful.
It’s an axiom in my field (“Middle Eastern Studies, broadly speaking) that “Arabs aren’t allowed to narrate” — and it’s a pretty accurate one, at that, at least in the West (or: It was until 
