Maybe if they stopped bombing us, we’d stop bombing them… If they have a million displaced persons, we have 120,000 families looking for places to stay because of the rockets.  If we have fewer casualties, it’s because we have a warning system that they could have built as well.  And sometimes pieces of shattered rockets fall on us, so we stay sheltered.  We scurry out and scurry back in.

The 222 hostages have still to be identified and listed –  none of them are guilty of a single crime – almost quarter are still in diapers, or back in diapers.   They all have families – some still alive – who know nothing about their physical state much less their mental state.   These are to be exchanged for 100 odd prisoners who were arrested because they tried to kill us.  This seems like a strange inbalance, but, okay, we would do it. 

I don’t think sufficient accurate information has reached the West to allow a reasonable judgement on what should be done.  Sure, we don’t get all the information either.  For example, we haven’t seen footage of the massacre in the areas down south – no rapes, no beheadings, no fetuses ripped from their terrified mothers.  We just hear a few of the stories that survivors tell.  

We have 4 tv channels:  One is so rightist that I can’t bear to watch it, the others have Arab commentators, moderators, photographers, and guests – almost in proportion to the population of people living here.  I’m watching Lucy Aharash (who begins her broadcast with  ‘masa el nur’ (good evening in Arabic) right now as I write because I have to know whatever I can at any given moment.  Sometimes I watch CNN or new in France to get a bigger picture.  I still can’t absorb anything because I’m not able to concentrate, and I worry about the all the people who are suffering because of the brutality of Hamas, and the unpredictability of Hizballah.

Orit calls to ask Ezi if a half a ton bomb from Hizballah would flatten her house.  He says yes, but assures her it won’t come to that because we’d flatten Lebanon.  Just before that Joe calls from the States to ask if it’s true that we’re rounding up local Arabs.  I hope not – because I have an appointment tomorrow with an Arab doctor, and I have to pick up the prescription from an Arab pharmacist, and some of my neighbors are Arab, and- oh, I forgot to write one of my aged Arab colleagues to see how he is faring…