January 1, 2009

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto points out a moral equation, found in the juxtaposition of two news reports, that helps put the war in Gaza in context.

On Monday, The New York Times reported on the scene inside Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where “armed Hamas militants” roamed the halls alongside patients and doctors. The Times interviewed the widow of a man unlucky enough to have been brought to the hospital after an Israeli attack on the prison where he had been awaiting trial for “collaborating” with Israel. The Hamas gunmen offered their own swift version of justice, shooting the patient just as they had killed five other hospitalized “collaborators” in the previous 24 hours.

Meanwhile, at Ashkelon’s Barzilai hospital, where essential departments had been moved to a bomb shelter, the Associated Press reported that doctors were treating Gaza patients alongside Israelis. Dr. Ron Lobel, the hospital’s deputy director, told the AP “it wasn’t uncommon to have a colleague in Gaza call him for assistance even as rockets rained down on Ashkelon.”

“‘It might seem completely absurd,’ Lobel said, ‘but we have the privilege to be doctors. Our medical ethics do not distinguish between patients. We treat whoever needs to be treated.’”

No one relishes the blood and suffering being inflicted in Israel’s war on Hamas, even in a war as justifiable as this, a reluctantly prosecuted but unavoidable attempt to silence a deadly provocation Israel never asked for. There is no contradiction between praying for the safety of Israel’s soldiers, for the welfare of civilians on both sides, and for leaders in the region to have the wisdom to know when the bombs must give way to talk.

But the hospital stories suggest that the fighting will not end so long as Hamas embraces an ideology of rejection and vengeance, and so long as its people do not embrace an alternative leadership that values the living as much as the dead.

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